Researchers studying the genetic roots of antisocial behavior report that children with one variant of a serotonin transporter gene are more likely to exhibit psychopathic traits if they also grow up poor. The study, the first to identify a specific gene associated with psychopathic tendencies in youth, appears this month in the Journal of Abnormal […]
I heard a story once about a Native American elder who was asked how she had become so wise, so happy, and so respected. She answered: “In my heart, there are two wolves: a wolf of love and a wolf of hate. It all depends on which one I feed each day.”
New research published in the August edition of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Abnormal Psychology, is providing a better picture of the roles played by gender, personality, and mental illness in domestic violence. “Intimate partner violence is a major public health concern,” says the study’s lead author Zach Walsh, assistant professor of psychology at […]
What makes something funny? Philosophers have been tossing that question around since Plato. Now two psychological scientists think they’ve come up with the formula: humor comes from a violation or threat to the way the world ought to be that is, at the same time, benign. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal […]
Personality traits observed in childhood are a strong predictor of adult behavior, a study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, the Oregon Research Institute and University of Oregon suggests. The study will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, a quarterly publication of the Association for Research […]
How positively you see others is linked to how happy, kind-hearted, and emotionally stable you are, according to new research by a Wake Forest University psychology professor. The study appears in the July issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Peter Harms at the University of Nebraska and Simine Vazire of Washington University […]
Results of a study of antidepressant treatment for major depression suggest that changes in personality traits seen in patients taking the drug paroxetine (Paxil) may not be the result of the medication’s lifting of mood but may instead be a direct effect of this class of drugs and part of the mechanism by which they […]
Personality traits associated with impulsivity normally decrease during emerging and young adulthood, and these decreases are associated with reduced substance use. A new study of “trajectories” of impulsivity and their association with problem alcohol use has found that the 18-to-25-years-of-age group exhibited the largest declines in impulsivity as well as the sharpest decreases in alcohol […]
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