http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. Scientists from Royal Holloway University have found that when white Caucasians are under the illusion that they have a dark skin, their racial bias changes in a positive way. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-darker-skin-positively-impact-racial.html Psychology & Psychiatry Tue, 14 May 2013 19:10:01 EST news287773954 Vertebrates are predisposed to act to gain rewards, and to lay low to avoid punishment. Try to teach chickens to back away from food in order to obtain it, and you'll fail, as researchers did in 1986. But (some) humans are better thinkers than chickens. In the May 8 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers show that the level of theta brainwave activity in the prefrontal cortex predicts whether people will be able to overcome these ingrained biases when doing so is required to achieve a goal. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-theta-brainwaves-ability-built-in-bias.html Neuroscience Tue, 07 May 2013 17:00:05 EST news287141209 A tumor is not a uniform mass of identical cells. However, teasing apart genetic heterogeneity within a biopsied tumor can be difficult. Researchers often fail to tell the difference between a rare variant in a DNA dataset or a small error because of imprecision in existing high-throughput sequencing technologies. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-rare-mutations-harbored-diverse-populations.html Cancer Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:30:03 EST news286004541 (Medical Xpress)—Encouraging young people at high-risk of criminal offending and delinquency to see happiness rather than anger in facial expressions results in a decrease in their levels of anger and aggression, new research from the University of Bristol has found. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-happiness-ambiguous-facial-aggressive-behaviour.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:10:05 EST news283596101 Is there a double standard for gay parents? A new study published this month by a Binghamton University research team suggests that gay parents are being judged more harshly than straight parents. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-same-sex-parents-harshly-heterosexual.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:37:09 EST news283433775 (Medical Xpress)—We all know about the dangers of negative stereotyping. But what about positive stereotyping? Is it really bad to assume that women are more in touch with their emotions or that immigrants work harder than the majority population? Research led by Aaron Kay, a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, reveals that positive stereotypes may actually be worse. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-dangers-positive-stereotypes.html Psychology & Psychiatry Fri, 01 Feb 2013 07:21:40 EST news278925691 In a new Lloyd's emerging risk report, a team of experts from the University of Kent has shown how principles from behavioural science can be used to manage new and emerging risks more effectively. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-behaviour-important-industry.html Health Fri, 14 Dec 2012 07:03:44 EST news274691008 From the playground to the office, a key aspect of our social lives involves figuring out who "belongs" and who doesn't. Our biases lead us—whether we're aware of it or not—to favor people who belong to our own social group. Scientists theorize that these prevalent in-group biases may give us a competitive advantage against others, especially when important resources are limited. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-tight.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:37:58 EST news273325062 Medical doctors are as biased against obesity as the general public is, according to a study published Nov. 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Janice Sabin from the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-anti-fat-bias-equally-prevalent-medical.html Health Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:00:31 EST news271519591 Caffeine perks up most coffee-lovers, but a new study shows a small dose of caffeine also increases their speed and accuracy for recognizing words with positive connotation. The research published November 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Lars Kuchinke and colleagues from Ruhr University, Germany, shows that caffeine enhances the neural processing of positive words, but not those with neutral or negative associations. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-caffeine-recognition-positive-words.html Neuroscience Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:00:04 EST news271519669 Anxiety disorders affect approximately 40 million American adults each year, and although they are treatable, they often cause significant distress. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-neuroeconomics-decision-making-anxious-individuals.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 23 Jul 2012 10:27:16 EST news262258030 (HealthDay) -- Patients with remitted major depressive disorder (MDD) have reduced guilt-selective temporofrontolimbic coupling between the right superior anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and subgenual cingulate cortex and adjacent septal region (SCSR), a region of interest for biases toward guilt versus indignation, according to a study published online June 4 in the Archives of General Psychiatry. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-depression-linked-temporofrontolimbic-coupling.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:40:14 EST news258207803 (HealthDay) -- It was the small square photo clipped to an applicant's resume that most influenced whether a woman would be hired. But there was a hidden catch: The pictures showed the same six women both before and after weight-loss surgery. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-obese-job-tougher.html Health Thu, 17 May 2012 09:19:53 EST news256465187 (Medical Xpress) -- A new analysis of hundreds of existing research studies shows that lesbians, gays and bisexuals experience high rates of victimization. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-high-victimization-gays-lesbians-bisexuals.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 07 May 2012 06:58:04 EST news255592663 New evidence that physician attitudes and stereotypes about race, even if unconscious, affect the doctor-patient relationship in ways that may contribute to racial disparities in health care http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-unconscious-racial-bias-doctors-linked.html Health Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:00:06 EST news251033099 A comprehensive study in this week's PLoS Medicine shows levels of the amino acid, homocysteine, have no meaningful effect on the risk of developing coronary heart disease, closing the door on the previously suggested benefits of lowering homocysteine with folate acid once and for all. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-high-blood-homocysteine-linked-coronary.html Cardiology Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:00:08 EST news249063402 The brain is a fantastically complex and mysterious device, too large and with too many internal connections to be entirely programmable genetically. Its internal connectivity must therefore self-organize, based on the one hand on genetically regulated biases and on experience and learning on the other. The brain can change its internal connectivity based, for example, on correlations between the inputs it receives and the consequences of actions associated with those inputs, in a phenomenon we generally call associative learning. There are, in our daily life, numerous examples of this type of learning; its consequence is that a smell or a tune on the radio can trigger memories from the past, which lay dormant for some time. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-mechanistic-insights.html Neuroscience Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:10:02 EST news246876564 Every year, at least 116 million adult Americans experience chronic pain, a condition that costs the nation between $560 billion and $635 billion annually, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Much of this pain is preventable or could be better managed, added the committee that wrote the report. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-iom-cultural-attitudes-pain.html Health Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:38:27 EST news228569896 Patients posting their opinions about doctors on online ratings websites are much less likely to discuss physicians with low perceived quality and are more prone than offline populations to exaggerate their opinions, according to a paper being presented at a healthcare conference sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-physician-rating-websites-biased.html Other Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:43:46 EST news227270608 Psychologists have found that people may make economic and trust decisions based on unconscious or unintentional racial biases. The study, conducted in the laboratory of New York University Professor Elizabeth Phelps, is published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-uintentional-racial-biases-affect-economic.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:00:05 EST news222949889