Slider

Science

SCITECH

AMAZING FACTS

NATURE SPACE

Psychology

Psychologists have no idea how to rehabilitate sex offenders.

Posted date: 12:31 PM / comment : 0 ,

Prison programs that have been in place for decades to rehabilitate convicted sex offenders may not work at all, according to a new study.
Sex offender treatment programs — in which offenders follow a syllabus aimed at “normalizing” their sexual impulses and fantasies — have not been shown to reduce the likelihood that sex offenders will change their behavior after they get out of jail, forensic psychiatrist David K. Ho  in the BMJ medical journal.
Source

“No evidence from academic or policy research has shown that the treatment program significantly reduces sexual reoffending,” David K. Ho, a forensic psychologist at South Essex Partnership University in England, writes in BMJ. “Victims and the public deserve to know this.”

--> “Sex offenders are sent to prison, undergo this treatment program, are deemed to have been somewhat rehabilitated and are released to the public,” Ho wrote. “However, they are as likely to offend as before receiving treatment.”

In 2012, a major review of sex offender treatment programs concluded that for a regime that has been imposed on so many prisoners, there had not been nearly enough research proving its worth. No one has done studies rigorous enough to prove that it’s useless either, though — and that lack of data is a real problem. “Not only could this result in the continued use of ineffective (and potentially harmful) interventions, but it also means that society is lured into a false sense of security in the belief that once the individual has been treated, their risk of reoffending is reduced,” the authors wrote. “Current available evidence does not support this belief.”

--> Sex offenders who receive outpatient treatment are less likely to repeat offend than those who don’t receive this treatment, but the efficacy of sex offenders’ treatment while in prison is questionable at best. “Treatment varies widely — most programs combine cognitive behavioral therapy with lessons about empathy and anger management — and, in most cases, never ends,” writes Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker.

References

2. NCBI

No such thing as porn “addiction,” researchers say

Posted date: 9:47 AM / comment : 0 , , , ,

Review article highlights lack of strong research about addictive nature of viewing sexual images
Journalists and psychologists are quick to describe someone as being a porn “addict,” yet there’s no strong scientific research that shows such addictions actually exists. Slapping such labels onto the habit of frequently viewing images of a sexual nature only describes it as a form of pathology. These labels ignore the positive benefits it holds. So says David Ley, PhD, a clinical psychologist in practice in Albuquerque, NM, and Executive Director of New Mexico Solutions, a large behavioral health program. Dr. Ley is the author of a review article about the so-called “pornography addiction model,” which is published in Springer’s journal Current Sexual Health Reports.
11930
Current Sexual Health Reports
“Pornography addiction” was not included in the recently revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual because of a lack of scientific data. Fewer than two in every five research articles (37 percent) about high frequency sexual behavior describe it as being an addiction. Only 27 percent (13 of 49) of articles on the subject contained actual data, while only one related psychophysiological study appeared in 2013. Ley’s review article highlights the poor experimental designs, methodological rigor and lack of model specification of most studies surrounding it.
The research actually found very little evidence – if any at all – to support some of the purported negative side effects of porn “addiction.” There was no sign that use of pornography is connected to erectile dysfunction, or that it causes any changes to the brains of users. Also, despite great furor over the effects of childhood exposure to pornography, the use of sexually explicit material explains very little of the variance in adolescents' behaviors. These are better explained and predicted by other individual and family variables.
Instead, Ley and his team believe that the positive benefits attached to viewing such images do not make it problematic de facto. It can improve attitudes towards sexuality, increase the quality of life and variety of sexual behaviors and increase pleasure in long-term relationships. It provides a legal outlet for illegal sexual behaviors or desires, and its consumption or availability has been associated with a decrease in sex offenses, especially child molestation.
Clinicians should be aware that people reporting “addiction” are likely to be male, have a non-heterosexual orientation, have a high libido, tend towards sensation seeking and have religious values that conflict with their sexual behavior and desires. They may be using visually stimulating images to cope with negative emotional states or decreased life satisfaction.
“We need better methods to help people who struggle with the high frequency use of visual sexual stimuli, without pathologizing them or their use thereof,” writes Ley, who is critical about the pseudoscientific yet lucrative practices surrounding the treatment of so-called porn addiction. “Rather than helping patients who may struggle to control viewing images of a sexual nature, the ‘porn addiction’ concept instead seems to feed an industry with secondary gain from the acceptance of the idea.”
Reference:
Ley, D. et al. (2014). The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the “Pornography Addiction” Model, Current Sexual Health Reports. DOI 10.1007/s11930-014-0016-8.

Married Men Are Fatter Than Their Singleton Counterparts

Posted date: 10:47 AM / comment : 0 , , ,

It's an old wives tale that women "let themselves go" after marriage, a new study suggests. It's actually married men who are larger than their single counterparts. 
man and woman walking couple hand in hand
Many studies point to the health and psychological benefits of marriage, but the new study published in the journal Families, Systems, & Health on Jan. 13 suggests that marriage may not be as great as it seems health-wise — at least not for men.
The scientists used data from Project EAT that monitored the diet, physical activity, and weight status of about 2,300 young adults in the Midwest. About 35% of the total sample were single or casually dating, 42% were in a committed relationship, and 23% were married.
The results suggest that married men were 25% more likely to be overweight or obese than single men or men in committed relationship. The scientists defined overweight as people having a body mass index over 25.
In the image below the first column of numbers shows the percent of men who are overweight and the last column shows the percent of women who are overweight. You can see that the married men column have the highest rate of obesity at 58.5%.
relationships and health

One of the most surprising results from the study is that married women were much more likely to regularly eat breakfast. They were 47% more likely to eat breakfast at least five times per week than single women or women in a committed relationship.
In the image below the first column of numbers shows the percent of men who eat breakfast and the last column of numbers shows the percent of women who eat breakfast at least five times per week. More than 60% of married eat breakfast regularly. 
relationship and health
There are tons of health benefits that come from eating breakfast, so the results of the study suggest that some married women may have a healthy edge.
This does not mean that being married will suddenly make you fat if you're a man, or make you crave breakfast if you're a woman. There are many other factors at play beyond the scope of the study, including who is likely to get married in the first place, the duration of relationships, and the tendency for people to select a partner based on shared habits.
The scientists found that relationship status made little difference in other health behaviors like eating lots of fruits and vegetables, eating less fast food, and exercising. Next they hope to examine how the quality of the relationship affects the health behaviors of the couple.

Research Shows How Emotional Similarity Reduces Stress

Posted date: 7:55 PM / comment : 1 , , ,

Two Stressed People Equals Less Stress, New Marshall Research
Does giving a speech in public stress you out? Or writing a big presentation for your boss? What about skydiving?
One way to cope, according to a new study from Sarah Townsend, assistant professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business, is to share your feelings with someone who is having a similar emotional reaction to the same scenario.
Townsend said that one of her study’s main discoveries is the benefit gained by spending time and conversing with someone whose emotional response is in line with yours. Such an alignment may be helpful in the workplace.
“For instance, when you’re putting together an important presentation or working on a high-stakes project, these are situations that can be threatening and you may experience heightened stress,” said Townsend. “But talking with a colleague who shares your emotional state can help decrease this stress.”
For “Are You Feeling What I’m Feeling? Emotional Similarity Buffers Stress,” in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Townsend and co-authors Heejung S. Kim of UC Santa Barbara and Batja Mesquita of University of Leuven, Belgium, had 52 female undergraduate students participate in a study on public speaking.
Participants were paired up and asked to give a speech while being video-recorded. However, prior to this, the pairs of participants were encouraged to discuss with each other how they were feeling about making their speeches. Each participant’s levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol were measured before, during and after their speeches.
The results “show that sharing a threatening situation with a person who is in a similar emotional state, in terms of her overall emotional profile, buffers individuals from experiencing the heightened levels of stress that typically accompany threat,” according to the study. In other words, when you’re facing a threatening situation, interacting with someone who is feeling similarly to you decreases the stress you feel, said Townsend.
“Imagine you are one of two people working on an important project: if you have a lot riding on this project, it is a potentially stressful situation,” Townsend said. “But having a coworker with a similar emotional profile can help reduce your experience of stress.”
Townsend, who recently launched the Culture, Diversity, and Psychophysiology Lab at Marshall, noted that motivating her research is the importance of cross-cultural understandings in the global marketplace. She hopes to continue her work by examining how developing emotional similarity can benefit people from different cultural backgrounds who must learn to function together in the workplace or the university classroom.
Ambitious professionals take note: According to Townsend, “We’ve found that emotional similarity is important. So now the question is: How do we get people to be more similar? What can you do to generate this emotional similarity with a coworker? Or, as a manager, how can you encourage emotional similarity among your team?”
So the next time you go skydiving, remember to buddy up with someone who feels the same way about it that you do.

Believing You’ve Slept Well, Even if You Haven’t, Improves Performance: Study

Posted date: 8:48 AM / comment : 0 , , ,

Problem:  Who even sleeps anymore? You and everyone you know are probably loading yourselves up with coffee or whatever your stimulant of choice is so you can plod through your day as some semblance of an upright human being. Then you get home and you don’t go to bed early enough because this is the only me-time you get, damn it, and if you want to watch three hours of Netflix, then you will. Or you try to go to sleep but you fail and end up tossing and turning, because sleeping is actually kind of hard, and the more you want it, the more it slips through your grasp.
But maybe the knowledge that you aren’t sleeping enough is part of what’s keeping you trapped in your swamp of lethargy during the day. Maybe if you were sweetly, blithely ignorant of your somnial failings, you’d feel more chipper and work more efficiently. In a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers from Colorado College tested the effects of being told you’re getting enough sleep—“placebo sleep,” as they call it.
Sleeping Improves Performance
Methodology: Participating undergrads first reported how deeply they’d slept the night before, on a scale of one to 10. The researchers then gave the participants a quick, five-minute lesson about sleep’s effect on cognitive function, telling them it was just background information for the study. During the lesson, they said that adults normally spend between 20 and 25 percent of their sleep time in REM sleep, and that getting less REM sleep than that tends to cause lower performance on learning tests. They also said that those who spend more than 25 percent of their sleep time in REM sleep usually perform better on such tests.
Then participants were hooked up to equipment that they were told would read their pulse, heartrate, and brainwave frequency, though it actually just measured their brainwave frequency. They were told that these measurements would allow the researchers to tell how much REM sleep they’d gotten the night before. This was not true.
Then one of the experimenters pretended to calculate that each participant got either 16.2 percent REM sleep or 28.7 percent REM sleep the previous evening. After getting their reading, participants took a test that measures “auditory attention and speed of processing, skills most affected by sleep deprivation,” according to the study.
A second experiment repeated these conditions, while controlling for experiment bias.
Results: Participants who were told they had above-average REM sleep performed better on the test, and those who were told their REM sleep was below average performed worse, even when researchers controlled for the subjects’ self-reported sleep quality.
Implications: A great victory was won here for lies, over truth. This study shows that if you’re in the mindset that you’re well-rested, your brain will perform better, regardless of the actual quality of your sleep. Conversely, constantly talking about how tired you are, as so often happens in our culture, might be detrimental to your performance.

Just 60 Seconds of Viewing Models May Change Women's Perceptions of Attractiveness

Posted date: 12:12 PM / comment : 0 , , ,

Media images strongly impact our perceptions of attractiveness. When we see slender women and muscular men lifted on a pedestal and endlessly fawned over, we're cued to think those forms are ideal.
In general, the majority of men depicted in media outlets are muscular and of a normal weight (though it should be noted that the methods they use to attain extremely lean looks are not always healthy).* The same cannot be said for women. Many female models who grace the pages of magazines and the screens of televisions are underweight. Weighing too little can be just as harmful as being obese. Sufferers contend with malnourishment, fragile bones, fatigue, and weakened immune systems. Moreover, previous studies have found that media images contribute to lower self-esteem, body dissatisfaction, and depressive mood in women.
Many have questioned what level of exposure to these images is required to skew what we perceive as attractive, particularly in regards to weight. According to new research published in PLoS ONE, it may take as little as sixty seconds.
Researchers at the University of Nottingham Campus in Malaysia recruited ninety-five college-aged subjects (46 men, 49 women), split them as evenly as possible into four groups, and exposed each group to 12 images of female models, each viewed for five seconds. One group viewed plus-size models previously rated to be highly attractive, one viewed plus-size models rated as less attractive, one viewed light-weight highly attractive models, and one viewed light-weight less attractive models. After viewing the slideshow, participants looked through manufactured images of a woman whose Body Mass Index (BMI) was subtly altered in each photo and were asked to select which image they deemed to be most attractive.
Men in the four different groups did not differ appreciably in their views on female attractiveness, but women did. When viewing light-weight highly attractive models, female participants rated images with an average BMI of slightly less than 17 as most attractive. (For reference, any BMI under 18.5 is considered underweight for Asians.) However, women who viewed plus-size highly attractive models rated images with an average BMI of 18.4 as most attractive.
Results
"These results... help us to understand how exposure to images of models affects weight preferences of individuals," the researchers say. "Portraying models that are not extremely underweight as being attractive may help change both female and male perceptions of female attractiveness."
A couple key limitations of the study: First, it would have been valuable to see a control group who wasn't exposed to any model images. That way we could see the population's baseline views on attractiveness. Second, the subjects were Asian men and women from the University of Nottingham Campus in Malaysia, so the findings certainly don't extend to all cultures. However, it is refreshing to see a psychology study with subjects who aren't entirely WEIRD (Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries.)
Source: Stephen ID, Perera AT-M (2014) Judging the Difference between Attractiveness and Health: Does Exposure to Model Images Influence the Judgments Made by Men and Women? PLoS ONE 9(1): e86302. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086302
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
Copyright © 2014 Science and Nature
⬆
Top