Newly published research suggests they could also be called the generation with unrealistic expectations.

An analysis of the values and ambitions of American 12th graders finds “a growing discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them.” Psychologists Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Tim Kasser of Knox College report that, for high school seniors in 2005, 2006, and 2007, materialism remained at historically high levels, even as commitment to hard work declined.

Continue Reading...

“The results imply that atheists’ attitudes toward God are ambivalent, in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response,” concludes a research team led by University of Helsinki psychologist Marjaana Lindeman. Its study is published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.

Lindeman and her colleagues describe two small-scale experiments. The first featured 17 Finns, recruited online, who expressed high levels of belief, or disbelief, in God. They read out loud a series of statements while skin conductance data was collected via electrodes placed on two of their fingers.

Continue Reading...

Newly published research from Norway suggests that a comprehensive yoga program rapidly produces internal changes on a genetic level. The results help explain the well-documented health benefits of this ancient practice.

“These data suggest that previously reported (therapeutic) effects of yoga practices have an integral physiological component at the molecular level, which is initiated immediately during practice,” writes a research team led by Fahri Saatcioglu of the University of Oslo. The team’s study is published in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

But it’s not just champagne that’s lifting our spirits and banishing the wintertime blues. According to Google (and a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, Harvard and Johns Hopkins) mental illnesses — such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and anorexia — are far more seasonal than we think.

The epidemiologists, led by John Ayers, combed through every Google search performed in the United States and Australia between 2006 and 2010, looking for queries like “symptoms of” and “medications for” OCD, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar, depression, anorexia, bulimia and schizophrenia.

Continue Reading...

A study from Germany finds that men do a much better job of interpreting one vital set of signals — the emotions conveyed by the eyes — when they’re communicating with another man, compared to another woman.

“The finding that men are superior in recognizing emotions/mental states of other men, as compared to women, might be surprising,” a research team led by psychiatrist Boris Schiffer reports in the journal PLOS ONE. They add, however, that it makes considerable sense in evolutionary terms.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

On Tuesday, April 9, Brian K. Vaughan, creator of the popular comic book "Saga," released a statement on Tumblr claiming that the newest issue of his series was blocked from the App Store because of some potentially offensive imagery. “Fiona and I could always edit the images in question,” Vaughan wrote, referring to Fiona Staples, his co-creator, herself a popular comic book artist since the mid-2000s, “but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing shit.”

The images in question? Two postage-stamp-sized images of explicit (but not, by any means, erotic) gay sex.

Continue Reading...

Encouraging workers to get a little competitive on the elliptical by offering them cash incentives may be the best way to help them lose pounds—and to slow companies’ spiraling health care costs.

That’s what researchers from Michigan and Pennsylvania discovered when they implemented a dollars-for-dieters program among the medical staff at Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital.

Each participant was given a monthly weight-loss goal, based on his or her body-mass index, and assigned to one of two cohorts.

Members of the “individual incentive” cohort were eligible to win 100 dollars for every month that they hit their goal; if they fell short, the hospital simply kept the money.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

That’s the conclusion of a Stanford University research team, which found invoking the idea of interdependence undermined the motivation of European-American students to take a course in environmental sustainability.

The researchers, led by MarYam Hamedani of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, argue that in mainstream European-American culture, independence functions as a “foundational schema” — that is, an underlying design or blueprint that guides behavior.

Continue Reading...

Over the last 40 years cellphones have developed the ability to do so many different non-phone-call things, making calling more of “feature” or, oh no, an “app,” rather than a vital method of communication upon which this device’s existence is based.

So, 40 years on, it’s time to take stock of and ask yourself—as others have already done—what Your Cellphone can actually do.

Is your cellphone…

Killing you?

Continue Reading...

This post is based on a talk I gave at South by Southwest and a version of it first appeared at BBC Future.

Who invented the Internet?

To answer that seemingly simple question you basically have two options: you can go on for hours explaining the hundreds of people and institutions that contributed crucial advancements to the way that the Internet operates, or you can just say Vint Cerf. Or Leonard Kleinrock. Or Tim Berners-Lee.

People have been fighting for decades over who invented the net. Some will tell you that Vint Cerf’s work on its underlying protocols—TCP/IP—was its true beginning. Others will go back further in history and tell you that Leonard Kleinrock’s work on queuing theory was the real birth. Some may scoff at the idea of conflating the web and the Internet by suggesting Tim Berners-Lee, but in multiple-choice tests of the future the “right” answer will be determined by the next hundred years of how historians choose to tell that story.

Continue Reading...

Was it any coincidence that I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol till my freshman year of college, and underlined my English texts with colored pencils and a ruler? According to a six-year longitudinal study that looks at teenagers’ dating patterns, partying habits, and study skills, the simple answer is: no.

The study, published online last week by the Journal of Research on Adolescence, followed 620 students—half male, half female—from sixth grade through their senior year of high school. Once a year, researchers from the University of Georgia’s School of Public Health interviewed the students, asking them about their romantic lives, as well as their drug and alcohol use. From teachers, researchers collected academic evaluations — how organized and hard-working was the student? How often did they turn in their homework and complete the assigned reading?

Continue Reading...

“Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages,” psychologists Shannon Rauch and Kimberley Schanz write in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

They argue these heavy users log onto the site in search of social inclusion rather than information — and as such, they’re prone to express agreement with the material they see without thinking about it too deeply. This combination of “a need to connect and an ethos of shallow processing” creates an atmosphere conducive to the spread of racist thoughts.

Continue Reading...

Prejudice, like diabetes, is a condition for which no drug yet exists, and as a new bit of research in the Canadian Medical Association Journal demonstrates, even physicians working in a universal care system aren’t immune to its effects.

Stephen Hwang, an internist at the University of Toronto, wanted to know just how endemic socioeconomic discrimination was in local clinics. “I provide care for a number of people who are homeless and marginalized in society,” he says, “and they not infrequently mention to me that they feel that, in the past, they’ve been treated differently by certain health care providers. They feel that it was simply because they were poor or homeless.”

Continue Reading...

That’s the implication of newly published research, which finds people who study science — or who are even momentarily exposed to the idea of scientific research — are more likely to condemn unethical behavior and more inclined to help others.

“Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms,” report psychologists Christine Ma-Kellams of Harvard University and Jim Blascovich of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research is published in the online journal PLOS One.

The researchers describe four experiments, all conducted at UCSB, that back up their surprising conclusion.

Continue Reading...

If so, it’s not reflected in our writing.

A new study finds that, in a large dataset of English-language books, the use of terms expressing six basic emotions steadily decreased over the course of the 20th century. “We believe the changes (in word usage) do reflect changes in culture,” writes the research team, led by anthropologist Alberto Acerbi of the University of Bristol.

Writing in the online journal PLOS One, they note that their findings mirror social conditions, with terms reflecting happy moods peaking in the 1920s and 1960s, and those suggesting sad moods reaching their apex in the war years of the 1940s.

Continue Reading...

Well, think again. A new study finds that, among the American public, the taboo against the use of nukes is far weaker than you might imagine.

“When people are faced with scenarios they consider high-stakes, they end up supporting—or even preferring—actions that initially seem hard to imagine,” said Daryl Press, an associate professor at the Dartmouth College Department of Government.

Continue Reading...

Here’s a quick medical quiz: What’s the most common reason for hospitalization in the United States? Take a stab. Respiratory distress? Cardiac arrest?

Try childbirth. As researchers at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health observe, more than four million babies are born in American hospitals every year, and from maternal checkups to newborn care, moms-to-be rack up more charges than any other patients. In 2009, those costs totaled nearly $30 billion.

Maternal health care is a big burden on Medicaid, which pays the expenses of low-income patients and annually foots the bill for 45 percent of all births. What’s more, low-income moms have disproportionately high rates of complication and Caesarean section. According to the Minnesota researchers, Medicaid mothers are more likely to give birth prematurely, or to low-weight babies, than more affluent women.

Continue Reading...