Social Sciences

Authors call on physicians and parents to engage players in discussions about media violence and its implications

A new study finds that Teen-rated video games contain significant amounts of violence and death. Led by researchers at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Kids Risk Project at the Harvard School of Public Health, the study appears March 12 in Medscape General Medicine (www.medgenmed.com), the first and only online, peer-reviewed pri

Current measures which fail to significantly predict whether sexual offenders will repeat their crime could be improved by taking into account psychological and lifestyle factors. These factors could also enhance risk assessment for violent offenders.

This is the conclusion of Leam Craig, of Forensic Psychology Practice Ltd and Anthony Beech and Kevin Browne of the Psychology Department at Birmingham University, who will present their research today, Monday 22 March 2004, at the British Psy

Seemingly incidental emotions can influence the prices at which individuals buy and sell goods, according to a groundbreaking study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

While prior research has found that people set a higher price for objects they own than they themselves would be willing to pay—which economists call the endowment effect—the Carnegie Mellon study found that people who are sad actually are willing to accept less money to sell something than they would pay for the s

In the way magic eye posters simultaneously hide and reveal the main point of the picture, new research suggests that children might well be asking more than their simply-worded questions seem to indicate.

Normally, adults assume that when children ask, “What is this?” in reference to an object, they are seeking merely a name–some kind of label to help differentiate the elements of their rapidly burgeoning universes. However, a new study explored the possibility that children posing such

Despite conventional wisdom, simply watching television is not related to a child’s weight, but playing video games may be, new research indicates.

“Children with higher weight status spent moderate amounts of time playing electronic games, while children with lower weight status spent either little or a lot of time playing electronic games,” say Elizabeth A. Vandewater, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Texas in the Journal of Adolescence. “Moderate” play, while it sounds benign,

The emotion control center of the brain, the amygdala, shows significantly higher levels of activation in males viewing sexual visual stimuli than females viewing the same images, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience study led by Emory University psychologists Stephan Hamann and Kim Wallen. The finding, which appears in the April edition of “Nature Neuroscience,” demonstrates how men and women process visual sexual stimuli differently, and it may explain gender variations in reproductiv