Social Sciences

When it comes to outdoor recreation, men and women differ not just in the activities they choose, but also in the way they perceive questions about how they spend their free time, according to Penn State researchers.

“We know there are differences in the way men and women respond to questions about outdoor activities,” says Laurlyn K. Harmon, graduate student in leisure studies. “But do they also differ in the way they are interpreting the questions? A simple question could result in systema

The ability to recognize persons encountered during highly threatening and stressful events is poor in the majority of individuals, according to a Yale researcher.

“Contrary to the popular conception that most people would never forget the face of a clearly seen individual who had physically confronted them and threatened them for more than 30 minutes, a large number of subjects in this study were unable to correctly identify their perpetrator,” said Charles Morgan III, M.D., associate prof

Few parent-adolescent discussions elicit as strong a reaction from both parties as the discussion about sexual activity. Yet research has shown this to be a critical discussion among parents and children. New research from the University of Missouri-Columbia suggests that when it comes to “the talk,” older siblings can play a vital role in helping adolescents make safer sexual choices.

Amanda Kolburn, assistant professor of human development and family studies at MU, examined the role that

The September 11 terrorist attacks demonstrated, for many people, that the world is not fair. This was especially distressing for people who had previously believed in a just world. Psychologists from Michigan Statue University and the University of California, Santa Barbara suggest that it’s this challenge to the view that the world is just that produced not only people’s distress after September 11, but also their desire for revenge.

In a study to be published in the July issue o

Players’ rankings at normal chess are accurate predictors of blitz chess performance

Chess is typically envisioned as a game of concentration and deliberation, a game not to be taken lightly and a game definitely not to be rushed. But some recent research suggests that it’s actually a player’s split-second intuitions that make the master.
Bruce D. Burns of Michigan State University, in an article to be published in the July issue of Psychological Science, a journal

For years, the advice of psychologists and mothers alike has been to express your emotions in order to achieve a balanced mental state. This might bring up some problems when your anxiety is going to make that presentation look shoddy, but hey, it’s better to show emotions than be like Spock, right?

Not quite. A new hypothesis on the issue of emotional expression is that we’re actually better off being flexible about how much we show our feelings – neither letting it all out nor ke