Virginia Tech

People who know what they are talking about, talk about the Virginia Tech shootings.

Plus, this week, which began with the massacre at Virginia Tech, also marks the anniversaries of the shootings at Columbine and the bombing in Oklahoma City. In this hour, we'll talk with two psychologists about the mind of the mass murderer. Can knowing more about the people who commit these acts help us prevent future violence?

Listen to the podcast on Science Friday.

Brainwaves©2007 Betsy Streeter
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The behaviors that get a person to the top don't disappear when they get there. This illustrates one concept in a systems view of organizations: in a system nothing is created nor destroyed just moved to another place.

Parasites Lost

Happy Parasites

Crazy Parasites

A Soft Sell With Cold, Hard Cash in Mind

Does “advertainment” cross an unseen line between commercial message and content where consumers ought not to go?

Sex abstinence classes

US students attending sexual abstinence classes are no more likely to abstain from sex than those who do not, according to a new study.
Participants in special programmes were just as likely to have sex a few years later as those who did not attend.

Nielsen Ratings

Nielsen to Get Off Sofa, Into Bars and Gyms

Long-Term Therapy Effective in Bipolar Depression

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/health/psychology/10therapy.html?ex=1333857600&en=8711d8967f9e0ac0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

A Fictional Video on MySpace Puts a TV Show’s Promotion Into Hyperspace

“As Robin Sparkle’s #1 Fan, it was my duty to create this page,” read the copy in the About Me section. “She’s just so cute and her music is so great. She must be the greatest pop singer from Canada ever!” Her featured hit song is called “Let’s Go to the Mall.”

Online Experiment for Print Magazine

The project offers another example of efforts by the print media to expand their digital presence in response to changing habits of both readers and advertisers. Last week, Lauren Rich Fine, who follows advertising and media stocks for Merrill Lynch, raised her estimates for the worldwide growth of online ad revenue for 2007 as well as 2008.

Belief in reincarnation tied to memory errors

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.
The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Opt Out or Pushed Out?

On October 26, 2003, The New York Times Magazine jump-started a century-long debate about women who work. On the cover it featured “The Opt Out Revolution,” Lisa Belkin’s semipersonal essay, with this banner: "Why don’t more women get to the top? They choose not to." Inside, by telling stories about herself and eight other Princeton grads who no longer work full-time, Belkin concluded that women were just too smart to believe that ladder-climbing counted as real success.

Not true!

Here's the hugh report from the UC Hastings School of Law.

the brain is a "cobbled-together mess."

David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, doesn't see it that way. To him, the brain is a "cobbled-together mess." Impressive in function, sure. But in its design the brain is "quirky, inefficient and bizarre ... a weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have accumulated throughout millions of years of evolutionary history..."

This is just what I've been trying to describe to my social psych classes in describing Wilson's idea of the adaptive unconscious.

Perks at Wal-mart

At Wal-Mart, Lessons in Self-Help

The program, to be announced today, tests the assumption, if not conventional wisdom, that environmentalism and fitness are luxuries of the well-off, inaccessible to a vast number of the nation’s working class because of hectic schedules, stretched budgets and bad habits.

Time in the animal world

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/science/03time.html?ex=1333425600&en=c983aa1f96b5a3c5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Several experiments are described. Notice how difficult it was to design experiments to test the hypothesis and how the experimental results are interpreted to support the hypotheses.

Many Diagnoses of Depression May Be Misguided, Study Says

The study’s findings suggest that previous estimates of the number of Americans who suffer depression at least once during their lives — more than 30 million — are about 25 percent too high.

NYT's article on Phil Zimbardo's latest book

Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil

Salient Ads

Ads need to catch your attention to work.

And if the ad makes you feel good, via engendering a "it's cool" response, then you may connect that emotion to the ad or brand. Regardless, billboards usually can't created attitude change along the central route -- usually there's not enough cognitive ability.