Description
The goal of this blog is to better understand why people think, feel, and behave the way they do. This, we can all agree, is more difficult than it sounds. If for example, we are trying to explain why my neighbor bangs on the ceiling whenever I'm at home in my apartment, we certainly can generate some theories (e.g., s/he is aggressively swatting flies, doing exuberant jumping jacks, etc...). What's unique, in some ways, about this blog is that we'll be generating theories about behavior from cutting-edge psychological science!
Psych Your Mind's Latest Posts
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Yesterday, my spouse and I dropped our newborn daughter off with Grandma and then popped over to the local theater to see this summer's much anticipated comic-book blockbuster Man of Steel. By any standard, Man of Steel is exceptionally light when it comes to philosophical musings: The plot is predictably linear--good guys fight bad guys who are trying to kill them. At first glance, it may seem like a stretch to write an entire blog entry (for a psychology blog) about the […]
Kraus MW & Keltner D (2013). Social Class Rank, Essentialism, and Punitive Judgment., Journal of personality and social psychology, PMID: 23713698
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I've been doing this whole parenting thing for almost three months now and it has been simultaneously gratifying, terrifying, exhausting, and fascinating. One thing I haven't been doing is sleeping, and because of this I have had a lot of time to read up on some neat research on new parents. Last time I wrote about how parenting reduces Testosterone in men. Today I blog about the relationship between parenting and immune function.
Can parenting boost the immune system?
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Sneed, R., Cohen, S., Turner, R. & Doyle, W. (2012). Parenthood and Host Resistance to the Common Cold, Psychosomatic Medicine, 74 (6) 567-573. DOI: 10.1097/PSY.0b013e31825941ff
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Hello again, PYM readers. It is now June and I just finished my first full academic year as a faculty member at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Chambana). Having just passed through the rabbit hole, I have returned mostly unscathed to blog a bit about my experience. As this is just my first year, I don't have any advice that will help others who are transitioning to professor-hood, rather, this post reflects some of the things that I think people (like me) deal with during […]
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Last week Science published a neat little paper examining links between specific human DNA sequences and educational attainment. The paper, which is a bit shorter than the list of authors who worked on the project, examined a total sample of more than 120,000 participants who had their entire genome sequenced for a number of small clusters of repeating nucleotides (single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs). They then examined all the SNPs and their associations with the level of educational […]
Rietveld, C. A. (2013). GWAS of 126,599 individuals identifies genetic variants associated with educational attainment, Science, Other: Link
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This week, new research was released suggesting that
sunscreen not only reduces the risk for skin cancer, but that it also slows
skin aging. In this study, people who were told to use sunscreen daily had
fewer lines and less coarse skin after four years than those who used it as
they normally would. I’ve seen this study all over the news (here, here, and
here)! Though doctors say they have long been telling patients that sunscreen
protects against skin aging, they are now excited to […]
Mahler, H., Kulik, J., Gerrard, M. & Gibbons, F. (2007). Long-term effects of appearance-based interventions on sun protection behaviors., Health Psychology, 26 (3) 350-360. DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.26.3.350
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