A new study involves rats, coffee, amphetamines, booze, decision-making, and lots more. It answers a good percentage of the questions you might care to ask about psychology or anything else. The study is: “Sensitivity to Cognitive Effort Mediates Psychostimulant Effects on a Novel Rodent Cost/Benefit Decision-Making Task,” Paul J Cocker, Jay G Hosking, James Benoit […]
Tag: Psychology
Stress Test for Vicars
What’s special about vicars? This study, from Bispebjerg University Hospital, Copenhagen, looked into the question: “Psychosocial stress among Danish vicars,” F. Gyntelberg, H. O. Hein and P. Suadicani, Occupational Medicine (2012) 62 (1): 12-16. The authors explain: “No studies have analysed whether differences in psychosocial workloads between vicars and others explain their higher prevalence of stress-related […]
Budgerigarian Contagious Yawning (quite untortoisean!)
Although scientists have failed to find evidence of contagious yawning in tortoises (though those scientists succeeded in winning an Ig Nobel Prize), other scientists have now found evidence, they say, of contagious yawning in budgies [a non-yawning specimen of which is pictured here in a photo by Elektrofisch]. They published a study about it: “Evidence for […]
Orwell’s Believe-It-and-Not
“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it […]