science wire

A moral story that praises a character's honesty is more effective in getting young children to tell the truth than a story that emphasizes the negative repercussions of lying, according to research published in Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that stories such as "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and "Pinocchio" may not be effective cautionary tales when it comes to inspiring honest behaviour in children.

18 Jun 2014 Patients with mental illness are two and a half times more likely to be victims of homicide than people in the general population, according to a national study examining the characteristics of homicide victims across England and Wales, by The University of Manchester. Homicides committed by patients with mental illness have received much media attention, but patients' risk of being victims of homicide and their relationship to the perpetrators has rarely been examined.

It is with great pride that the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and McGill University announced today that Dr. Ashok Malla and his team will be leading the ACCESS Canada project, a

Two leading academics in Schizophrenia research from The University of Nottingham are holding a public event to better educate people about the illness.

When it hasn't been your day - your week, your month, or even your year - it might be time to turn to Facebook friends for a little positive reinforcement. According to a new study by social scientists at Cornell, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Facebook, emotions can spread among users of online social networks.

ANN ARBOR-Most of us find it easier to be wise about other people's problems than our own. But a new study identifies a simple way to close this gap. The research, conducted by social psychologists Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan, shows that the solution is self-distancing-considering your problems from the perspective of an observer.

A new institute at University Health Network and the University of Toronto will drive research into a controversial and neglected area of medicine: care for patients with life-threatening or terminal disease.

New video explains why Tetris - one of the world's biggest-selling computer games - is so compelling World Tetris Day (Friday 6 June 2014) celebrates 30th birthday of hit game Over the last 30 years,

ANN ARBOR-Whether it's initiated by their parents, friends or themselves, students often feel pressure to perform well in tests.

Menopausal women with high self-compassion may find that hot flushes interfere less with their lives, according a new study. A research team led by Lydia Brown, Dr Christina Bryant and Professor Fiona Judd from the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne has found that women with high self-compassion may be protected from some of the problems that hot flushes cause.

Press Release: Heavily Decorated Classrooms Disrupt Attention and Learning In Young Children, According To New Carnegie Mellon Research-Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University PITTSBURGH—Maps, number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to cover elementary classroom walls. However, new research from Carnegie Mellon University shows that too much of a good thing may end up disrupting attention and learning in young children.

Serious mental illnesses reduce life expectancy by 10 to 20 years, an analysis by Oxford University psychiatrists has shown - a loss of years that's equivalent to or worse than that for heavy smoking. Oxford researchers say their figures on life expectancy should galvanise governments and health and social services to put a much higher priority on how mental health services can prevent early deaths.

Playing the trust game In one variation of the trust game experiment, subjects had three options: They could keep $5; game over. They could give $5 to an unknown person, in which case the money quadrupled to $20, and the unknown person was given a choice about sharing $10 back to the subject or keeping it all.

Stanford research shows that Asian American children are motivated by their high-pressure mothers because those mothers often work alongside them - and the "selves overlap." Both Asian American and European American students evaluated their mothers positively and felt supported by them. Even if Asian and Western parenting styles differ radically, they represent two paths to the same destination, according to new Stanford research.

Challenges for social work in assessing and working with emotional abuse "She was cute but..in a very strange way" Previous research has shown that child protection social workers struggle with recognising, naming and intervening in cases where emotional abuse is or may be present. Definitions of emotional abuse remain disputed - in part because its causes and indicators are not always immediately visible: impairment to the child exists predominantly in the psychosocial domain rather than the physical.

Press release issued: 8 May 2014 New research has found adults need better support to enable them to cope with the challenges of being born with a cleft lip and/or palate. Many thousands of adults across the UK and the world are living with a cleft lip and/or palate, and yet many are unaware of the support that is available to them.

Rory O'Connor research profile Suicidal Behaviour Reseach Lab at University of Glasgow The Lancet Psychiatry journal In this Review, published to coincide with the launch of The Lancet Psychiatry journal, Professor Rory O'Connor from the University of Glasgow and Professor Matthew K. Nock from Harvard University review the key psychological factors that may contribute to, or protect against, suicidal behaviour including personality differences, cognitive factors, and negative life events such as serious physical illness, as well as current psychological treatments.

The University of Melbourne will collaborate with the State Government of Victoria to deliver the key objectives of the Global Health Melbourne Plan , launched by the State Government today.

The University of Melbourne will collaborate with the State Government of Victoria to deliver the key objectives of the Global Health Melbourne Plan , launched by the State Government today.

30 April 2014 Many mental health organisations, including those treating people with anorexia nervosa, feature testimonials on their websites from survivors and sufferers who describe the road to recovery. But how helpful are recovery stories to dealing with anorexia? "While anecdotally it is well known that people with anorexia often read memoirs of survival we do not know of any academic research into whether those stories are always helpful.

Would you sacrifice one person to save five? Such moral choices could depend on whether you are using a foreign language or your native tongue. A new study from psychologists at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona finds that people using a foreign language take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas, making decisions based on assessments of what's best for the common good.

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between the University and a leading homelessness charity has been given the highest possible rating by the UK's innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board.

A long-term study by UW-Madison researchers shows that people who experience chronic marital stress are less able to savor positive experiences, a hallmark of depression. Photo: iStock photo Marital stress may make people more vulnerable to depression, according to a recent study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and their colleagues.

A $3.8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation will fund "Hope and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations," a new research project co-directed by Cornell philosophy profess

Three little girls sit together in a room, playing with the toys surrounding them. One of the girls - "Emma" - has clearly taken charge of the group, and the others happily go along with her.

University of Washington A couple of years ago a University of Washington researcher who studies how children develop social behaviors like kindness and generosity noticed something odd. The 15-month-old infants in her experiments seemed to be playing favorites among the researchers on her team, being more inclined to share toys or play with some researchers than others.

If you start feeling better as spring begins pushing up its tender shoots, you might be living proof of a trend discovered in data from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin: The more green space in the neighborhood, the happier people reported feeling. "Across neighborhoods of Wisconsin, from the North Woods to the cities, the results are striking," says Dr. Kristen Malecki , assistant professor of population health sciences at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.

Why does the second hour of a journey seem shorter than the first? Why does the café 50 metres ahead of you feel closer than the one 50 metres behind you? New research from the University of Toronto Scarborough and U of T's Rotman School of Management shows the answer has to do with how you're physically oriented in space.

ANN ARBOR-Optimistic older adults who see the glass as half full appear to have a reduced risk of developing heart failure. Researchers from the University of Michigan and Harvard University found that optimism-an expectation that good things will happen-among people age 50 and older significantly reduced their risk of heart failure.

Collaborative research on mental health issues, from schizophrenia to disaster mental health, will be the focus of a new University of Melbourne and Peking University centre to be launched in Beijing today.

Professor Michael Kyrios has been appointed Director of the Research School of Psychology in the ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young AO has announced.

Our perception of time can depend on a number of factors - what we're doing, how much we're focusing on it, how we're feeling. But there's also quite a bit of variability between us in our individual sense of time passing. Researchers at Oxford University have investigated what plays a part in our perception of short, fleeting times of under a second.

N ew research conducted at Harvard demonstrates sharing behavior in African grey parrots. "I think people usually think of the natural world as being akin to Tennyson's 'Nature, red in tooth and claw,' " said Irene Pepperberg , a psychology researcher and co-author of the study. "But this type of sharing isn't unheard of in the wild.

Michael Robinson, from Sunderland, is in the second year of his PhD at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Irish Studies. His research project is investigating shell-shock, trauma, and the treatment of Irish Great War participants,  between 1914 and 1939.  "Little is known of the fate of Irish men who served during the Great War and suffered from psychological problems.

In his first work of fiction, Shimon Edelman, professor of psychology, hasn't strayed far from his interests, which focus on vision, language and consciousness and more generally on psychological, neurobiological and computational understanding of how the mind works.

27 Feb 2014 World Self-Injury Awareness Day is on Saturday 1 March and one of the UK's leading experts in self-harm and suicide is joining the call to try and raise awareness of the issue. Professor Nav Kapur works for Manchester Mental Health Social Care Trust and leads research at The University of Manchester's Centre for Suicide Prevention in the city.

21 February 2014 The University of Sydney today launched a new project which offers two years of free parenting support to parents and caregivers of children with a disability in New South Wales.

Federal and State Governments should ensure The University of Queensland's Triple P - Positive Parenting Program is accessible to all families, the program's founder told a conference in Sydney yesterday (20 February).

17 February 2014 A partnership between the University of Sydney and the NSW Government will deliver much needed mental health hospital beds and a range of services, including research beds, in a new

The new Human Neuroscience Institute in Cornell's College of Human Ecology aims to advance research on the neural basis of human behavior. "Prioritizing the word 'human' in the name of the institute underlines the common commitment to human development," said Valerie Reyna, director of the institute and co-director of the Cornell MRI Facility.

13 Feb 2014 Two groundbreaking research studies - by University of Manchester researchers - have been recognised nationally for their involvement of service users and carers in their programmes.

Valentine's Day is a day when we think about our romantic relationships - or lack thereof. But at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Couples Lab, every day is spent thinking about the importance of relationships.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession and the increased attention to the widening income gap, concern over the impact of inequality on children and families has risen.

Experts at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have devised an effective, replicable program using trained lay Community Health Worker (CHWs) to improve a range of outcomes among patients at high risk for poor post-hospital outcomes. In Penn's IMPaCT (Individualized Management for Patient-Centered Targets) model, CHWs hired from within the local community help patients to navigate the health care system and address key health barriers, such as housing instability or food insecurity.

s available on request : Lisa Zilberpriver  M: 0435 060 030 lisa.zilberpriver [a] unimelb.edu (p) au Registrations: http://education.unimelb.edu.au/positivepsychology2014/home Sc