Culture

Researchers are challenging conventional beliefs about the effectiveness of traditional strategies for encouraging healthy eating. The symposium, "Challenging Misconceptions About the Psychology of Food Choice," includes four presentations that tackle issues such as the harmfulness of weight-stigma, encouraging healthy choices, and strategies to help children and teens. The symposium is featured at the SPSP 16th Annual Convention in Long Beach, California.

Helping kids eat more vegetables

Rejected by a person you like? Just "shake it off" and move on, as music star Taylor Swift says. But while that might work for many people, it may not be so easy for those with untreated depression, a new brain study finds. The pain of social rejection lasts longer for them -- and their brain cells release less of a natural pain and stress-reducing chemical called natural opioids, researchers report in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Research published in Psychological Science has shown that experiential purchases (money spent on doing) may provide more enduring happiness than material purchases (money spent on having). Participants reported that waiting for an experience elicits significantly more happiness, pleasantness and excitement than waiting for a material good.

Social media has opened up a new digital world for psychology papers Four researchers will be discussing new methods of language analysis, and how social media can be leveraged to study personality, mental and physical health, and cross-cultural differences at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) 16th Annual Convention in Long Beach, California.

When local news media report about hometown companies, they use fewer negative words than when reporting about nonlocal companies, according to research by business experts at Rice University and the University of Texas at Dallas.

A team of Cornell University researchers focusing on a fictional zombie outbreak as an approach to disease modeling suggests heading for the hills, in the Rockies, to save your brains from the undead.

Reading World War Z, an oral history of the first zombie war, and a graduate statistical mechanics class inspired a group of Cornell University researchers to explore how an "actual" zombie outbreak might play out in the U.S.

Since the first experimental bone marrow transplant over 50 years ago, more than one million hematopoietic stem cell transplantations (HSCT) have been performed in 75 countries, according to new research charting the remarkable growth in the worldwide use of HSCT, published in The Lancet Haematology journal.

However, the findings reveal striking variations between countries and regions in the use of this lifesaving procedure and high unmet need due to a chronic shortage of resources and donors that is putting lives at risk.

We make hundreds, possibly thousands, of decisions each day without having full knowledge of what will happen next. Life is unpredictable, and we move forward the best we can despite not knowing every detail.

It's no different in the natural world. The Earth is warming, fish stocks and species counts fluctuate and we're experiencing more extreme weather. Conservation managers need to act quickly and make decisions about how to address these issues - even though questions remain.

How will we know if the economy has really gotten better, rather than using bogus claims about employment or how well Wall Street executives are doing? When senior citizens stop killing themselves.

Cancer data compiled by the World Health Organisation's (WHO) GLOBOCAN project has huge global influence and is used by Governments and international NGOs to determine health and funding priorities in sub-Saharan Africa.

World's challenges demand science changes - and fast, experts say.

The world has little use - and precious little time -- for detached experts.

A group of scientists - each of them experts - makes a compelling case in this week's Science Magazine that the growing global challenges has rendered sharply segregated expertise obsolete.

Lord Ara Darzi and Oliver Keown at the Institute of Global Health Innovation want a ban to help smokers quit and to protect children from seeing people lighting up.

Extending anti-smoking legislation in the UK to encompass a ban in parks and squares "is an opportunity to celebrate the great beacon of healthy living, clean air, and physical activity our green spaces are designed for," they write. "And, crucially, it is an opportunity to support our population - young and old - to make healthier lifestyle choices easier."

The use of animals in experimental research has soared at leading US laboratories in recent years, finds research published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

This is despite growing public opposition to animal experimentation, mounting evidence that animal studies often do not faithfully translate to people, and the development of new research technologies that supplant animal use.

The data contradict industry claims of reduced animal use and are at odds with government policies designed to curb and replace the use of animals in experiments, say the researchers.

Competition among doctors' offices, urgent care centers and retail medical clinics in wealthy areas of the U.S. often leads to an increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written per person, a team led by Johns Hopkins researchers has found.

"We found that both the number of physicians per capita and the number of clinics are significant drivers of antibiotic prescription rate," the researchers say in a report on the findings published online ahead of print in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

Sub-Saharan Africans rate their own wellbeing, their health and their health-care systems among the lowest in the world, according to a new report published by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Despite these low ratings, health care is not a primary policy concern for people in these countries. Instead, sub-Saharan Africans cite jobs as a top priority, followed by improving agriculture and tackling corruption.