Social Sciences

The 21st century craze to constantly reinvent ourselves is a dangerous addiction that can ruin lives, according to a controversial new book by sociologists Anthony Elliott (University of Kent) and Charles Lemert (Wesleyan University, USA).

The New Individualism: The Emotional Cost of Globalization, published by Routledge on 26 October 2005, is one of the first books to explore the personal and emotional impact of globalisation on real people, rather than its political or economi

The popular media has portrayed men and women as psychologically different as two planets – Mars and Venus – but these differences are vastly overestimated and the two sexes are more similar in personality, communication, cognitive ability and leadership than realized, according to a review of 46 meta-analyses conducted over the last 20 years.

According to the meta-analysis of studies on gender differences reported on in the current issue of the American Psychologist, males and

Prison bullying is not a one-way process, according to new research funded by the ESRC. Among bullies, it found that 71 per cent were also victims, and of those who had themselves been intimidated, 57 per cent bullied others.

Professor John Archer and Dr Jane Ireland of the University of Central Lancashire found no evidence to back the theory that ‘bully-victims’ – those who are both bullies and on the receiving end – are a special type of person.

Their findings, based

Tall people are more prepared to take risks than small people, women are more careful than men, and the willingness to take risks markedly decreases with age: these are the findings arrived at by researchers from the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), the University of Bonn and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin. For their study they evaluated more than 20,000 interviews with people from all over Germany and additionally confirmed the findings by experiment. What

Men who slide down the social ladder during their lifetime take the blow much harder than women in the same position, a new study shows.

Women were twice as likely to be downwardly mobile but generally avoided the depression and poor psychological wellbeing that researchers found in men in the same position.

Men who experienced a downward social shift were four times more likely to experience depression than men who improved their social status, whereas there was no

How you interact with your children when they’re just starting kindergarten helps determine their behavior by the time they finish fourth grade, according to a study published in the September/October 2005 issue of the journal Child Development. The study, from researchers at Wichita State University in Kansas, found that early parent-child relationships, including warmth, good communication and parental tracking of child behavior, serve as important building blocks for later monitoring (k