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164 news posts in Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

13 Sep 2016

Touchscreens may boost motor skills in toddlers

  by Conn Hastings, Frontiers Science Writer Younger use of touchscreens by toddlers correlates with increased fine motor control. Does your toddler use a touchscreen tablet? A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology has shown that early touchscreen use, and in particular actively scrolling the screen, correlates with increased fine motor control in toddlers. Smartphones and tablets are now commonplace at work and in the home. If you are reading this on your morning commute on public transport, it is likely to be on a touchscreen device, while surrounded by people who are completely absorbed by their own touchscreens. There has been a dramatic increase in the ownership and use of tablets and smartphones in recent years. In the UK, family ownership of touchscreen devices increased from 7% in 2011 to 71% in 2014. It is therefore not surprising that children are using touchscreens from a very early age, but is this a good thing or not? The effects of using touchscreens on young children are a concern for some parents and policymakers. Popular opinion holds that using touchscreens at an early age is likely to delay the cognitive development of children. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that […]

Psychology

12 Aug 2016

Burnout is caused by mismatch between unconscious needs and job demands

New research shows that burnout is caused by a mismatch between a person’s subconscious needs and the opportunities and demands at the workplace. These results have implications for the prevention of job burnout. Imagine an accountant who is outgoing and seeks closeness in her social relationships, but whose job offers little scope for contact with colleagues or clients. Now imagine a manager, required to take responsibility for a team, but who does not enjoy taking center-stage or being in a leadership role. For both, there is a mismatch between their individual needs and the opportunities and demands at the workplace. A new study in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology shows that such mismatches put employees at risk of burnout. Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion from work, which results in a lack of motivation, low efficiency, and a helpless feeling. Its health effects include anxiety, cardiovascular disease, immune disorders, insomnia, and depression. The financial burden from absenteeism, employee turnover, reduced productivity, and medical, legal, and insurance expenses due to burnout and general work-related stress is staggering: for example, the American Institute of Stress estimates the total cost to American enterprises at 300 billion US$ per […]

Psychology

28 Jul 2016

Music makes beer taste better

The music played in a bar can impact how much you enjoy your drink. by Samantha Bradey, Frontiersin.org Music can influence how much you like the taste of beer, according to a study published in Frontiers in Psychology. Their findings suggest that a range of multisensory information, such as sound, sensation, shape and color, can influence the way we perceive taste.   The Brussels Beer Project collaborated with UK band The Editors to produce a porter-style beer that took inspiration from the musical and visual identity of the band. The ale had a medium body and used an Earl Grey infusion that produced citrus notes, contrasting with the malty, chocolate flavors from the mix of grains used in production. This taste profile was designed to broadly correspond to The Editors latest album, ‘In Dreams’. Then, a team of researchers led by Dr. Felipe Reinoso Cavalho, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven, designed an experiment to see if the influence of music and packaging design would result in a more positive tasting experience. They invited 231 drinkers to experience the beer in three different conditions. The first served as a control group and drank the beer along with a bottle […]

Psychology

19 Jul 2016

Electric brain stimulation can improve mood and relieve stress

Feeling down? How about an electric pick-me-up for your brain? by K.E.D. Coan Electrical brain stimulation can improve the mood of healthy people as well as those suffering from depression, says study published in Frontiers in Psychology. More than 10% of American adults take antidepressants, according to the CDC’s last survey, but these drugs can come with a variety of unpleasant side effects. As an alternative, a team at Swansea University is developing an approach using electrical brain stimulation to alleviate stress and depression. Past studies have shown this method can relieve depression, but their most recent study presents the first evidence that it can also give healthy people a little boost when they’re feeling down. “We’ve shown that weak electric stimulation is effective to improve the mood of those who are not depressed, but are still affected by the consequences of a stressful, restless, and demanding lifestyle,” said Dr. Frederic Boy, Head of Translational and Consumer Neuroscience at Swansea. Although the idea of electric brain stimulation may give you pause for thought, researchers have safely used transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) for over a decade. Last year, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) also approved tDCS for the treatment […]

Psychology

13 Jun 2016

Children less likely to trust ugly people

A new study shows that children judge us on our looks – and beauty wins out on trustworthiness ratings by Abigail Pattenden, Frontiersin.org Is beauty only skin deep? Children don’t seem to think so, like adults and babies, children think the uglier you are, the less trustworthy you are. In a study recently published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers have found that as children, how we perceive someone’s trustworthiness is linked to how attractive we find them. Our ability to make this trustworthiness judgement develops as we grow, becoming more consistent as we approach adulthood, and, girls are better at it than boys. Many psychology studies have proven the existence of the so-called “beauty stereotype”. This describes the phenomenon whereby more attractive people are also considered to be smarter, more sociable and more successful. To be attractive is to be treated better by your peers, and preferred by new-born babies, than uglier people. People use facial cues to make judgements on a person’s character – and this ability to infer social traits is a crucial part of social functioning and development. Although well researched in babies and adults, the development of this ability in children was not previously known. Understanding […]

Psychology

09 Jun 2016

Witnesses can identify criminals by smell

Human nose-witnesses identify criminals in a lineup of body odor By Alice Rolandini Jensen, Frontiers science writer Move over sniffer dogs, people who witnessed a crime are able to identify criminals by their smell. Police lineups normally rely on sight, but nose-witnesses can be just as reliable as eye-witnesses, new research published in Frontiers in Psychology has found. “Police often use human eye-witnesses, and even ear-witnesses, in lineups but, to date, there have not been any human nose-witnesses;” explained Professor Mats Olsson, experimental psychologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden; “We wanted to see if humans can identify criminals by their body odor.” Dogs have been used to identify criminals through body odor identification in court, but it is commonly thought that the human sense of smell is inferior to that of other mammals. However, research shows that humans have the ability to distinguish individuals by their unique body odor. Our olfactory sense is often associated with emotional processing and is directly linked to the areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory; the hippocampus and the amygdala. To find out more about human odor memory following stressful events, Olsson and his team investigated how well we identify body odor […]

Psychology

11 May 2016

Swedes or Italians: Who is more likely to cheat on their taxes?

By Tania FitzGeorge-Balfour, Frontiers science writer Wide variations can be seen in how far citizens from different countries evade tax. While this can be attributed to how well institutions deter tax avoidance through audits and fines, cultural differences may also play a part. New research, reported in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, suggests that two countries, with contrasting reputations for trustworthiness, can show subtle differences in their compliance for paying taxes. “Our experiments demonstrate that Italians on average are just as honest as Swedes.  Interestingly, however, Italians are more likely to ‘fudge’ (cheat a little), whereas if a Swede decides to cheat, he is more likely to go all the way,” says Sven Steinmo, Professor at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study in Florence, Italy, co-author of this study. Participants for this research were recruited from Italy and Sweden. Swedes think that honesty is a typical national trait, whereas the trustworthiness of Italians is ranked as low, not only by other EU countries, but by Italians themselves. The subjects were asked to perform an experimental task that mirrored features of tax systems used by many countries. Currency units earned at the start of the test were reported voluntarily, […]

Psychology

10 May 2016

Study shows where you are is who you are

A recent study suggests that who we are might be more integrated with where we are than previously thought. Demonstrating how architects and urban planners might take guidance from disciplines like neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, reveals that a good built environment might promote well-being and effect our decisions. Contrary to the idea that we are separate from what we experience, the study claims that we ought to think about how the environment we create might, in turn, be used to create us. With this in mind, the scientists investigated how the way we interact with space defines how we identify ourselves and our capabilities. “The built environment can restrict or promote spatial cognition, which can influence one’s self-hood,” the researchers explain. “Our spatial coordinates and our ‘selves’ are intertwined.” According to the researchers, we understand our environment differently depending on our experience of it. For example, learning your way through a space using a map gives a different understanding than through learning your own route. In a mapped environment, the tendency is to think of objects in relation to one another, whereas finding your own way might lead to thinking about the space […]

Psychology

08 Apr 2016

Children’s interactions more complex than predicted

By Fernando Bolaños, science writer While sharing toys and fighting with each other, kindergarten children helped researchers understand the patterns and qualities of interactions in social groups. The results were much more complex than the scientists originally predicted. “We rightfully realize that social networks are important for many aspects of our lives. Yet when asked to define networks, we normally define them as ‘any interaction’, or only a specific type of interaction. We thought this does not reflect the richness of our social behaviors or the relative relationships between types of behaviors. We wanted to begin to address this,” said Jonathan Schneider, researcher from the Department of Biology at the University of Toronto. To better understand the dynamics of these social interactions, the researchers carried out an investigation using a layered social network analysis. Their research was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology. The researchers analyzed the structure of social interactions of 338 children between 4 to 6 years of age. All the children were kindergarteners attending public schools in Berkeley, California. The social exchanges took place in 29 classrooms. “We noticed previous analyses presumed the hierarchical relationships between kids and we wanted to investigate this assumption. So we developed […]

Robotics and AI

05 Apr 2016

Gestures improve communication – even with robots

  By Abigail Pattenden, science writer In the world of robot communication, it seems actions speak louder than words. Scientists in the UK have discovered that by getting robot avatars to “talk with their hands,” we understand them as well as we do our fellow human beings.   Avatars have been in existence since the 1980s and today are used by millions of people across the globe. They are big business too: from artificial intelligence to social media and psychotherapy to high-end video games, they are used to sell things, to solve problems, to teach us and to entertain us. As avatars become more sophisticated, and their use in society grows, research is focusing on how to improve communication with them.  Getting your message across with your avatar is more important than ever, and learning how to improve this communication is a big deal. Scientists Paul Bremner and Ute Leonards took on this challenge in a recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology. They built their study around the hypothesis that if avatars were to use “iconic” hand gestures together with speech, we would understand them more easily. Iconic gestures have a distinct meaning, like opening a door or a book, […]

Impact analysis

03 Nov 2015

Quality and Impact Analysis: Frontiers in Psychology

By Pascal Rocha da Silva, Frontiers analyst Frontiers in Psychology was launched in 2010. In just 4 years, it has become the largest and the 2nd most-cited psychology journal in the world . The Impact Factor (IF), defined as the total number of citations in a given year divided by the number of citable articles over the previous two-year period, is the most commonly accepted metric of journal quality (but not of an individual paper or researcher). It was formally established by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1975. As the IF can be heavily skewed by a few highly-cited papers, total citations generated over the same two-year period provide a more accurate indication of the overall influence or impact of the articles published by a journal in a field. Frontiers is a pioneer in the use of article-level and author-level metrics and encourages every author to use these to track the development of his or her readership on a more granular level. Analysis within the category of Psychology There are 597 journals listed in the category of Psychology in the 2014 Journal Citations Reports (JCR) provided by Thomson Reuters in 2015. Frontiers in Psychology is one of the 19 Gold open-access journals. Below, the results of our comparative […]

Frontiers news

02 Nov 2015

Quality and Impact Analysis: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2015

By Pascal Rocha da Silva, Frontiers analyst Frontiers in Human Neuroscience was launched in 2008. In just 6 years, it has become the #1 most-cited journal in psychology, the #1 most-cited open access journal dedicated to neuroscience and the 10th most-cited journal in all of neuroscience. It is also the 2nd and 3rd largest journal in all of psychology and neuroscience, respectively. The Impact Factor (IF), defined as the total number of citations in a given year divided by the number of citable articles over the previous two-year period, is the most commonly accepted metric of journal quality (but not of an individual paper or researcher). It was formally established by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1975. As the IF can be heavily skewed by a few highly-cited papers, total citations generated over the same two-year period provide a more accurate indication of the overall influence or impact of the articles published by a journal in a field. Frontiers is a pioneer in the use of article-level and author-level metrics and encourages every author to use these to track the development of his or her readership on a more granular level. Analysis within the categories of Neuroscience and Psychology There are 252 journals listed in the category of Neurosciences in the […]