Health News

Research questions link between unconscious bias and behavior: ‘Implicit bias’ is often cited as the underlying cause of discrimination;a new look at the evidence suggests the connection isn’t that strong

A new study calls into question the effectiveness of a popular concept for addressing social problems such as discrimination. Implicit bias, a term for automatically activated associations, is often perceived to be a primary cause of discrimination against social groups such as women and racial minorities. Identifying and understanding implicit bias and modifying behavior that’s […]

Health News

How arousal impacts physiological synchrony in relationships

A team of researchers led by a member of the Colorado School of Public Health faculty at the Anschutz Medical Campus examined what type of social interaction is required for people to display physiological synchrony — mutual changes in autonomic nervous system activity. The study also looked at whether the levels of autonomic arousal people […]

Health News

What’s causing your vertigo? Goggles may help with diagnosis

Vertigo is a form of severe dizziness that can result in a loss of balance, a feeling of falling, trouble walking or standing, or nausea. There is more than one type of vertigo, each with a different cause, and sometimes requiring different treatment. Now a proof-of-concept study has found that special goggles that measure eye […]

Health News

We are more envious of things that haven’t happened yet

We are more envious of someone else’s covetable experience before it happens than after it has passed, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Enviable events lose some power over us once those events are in our past,” says psychological scientist Ed O’Brien of the University of […]

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Self-perception and reality seem to line-up when it comes to judging our own personality: For most people, how you think of yourself closely matches that of your peers

When it comes to self-assessment, new U of T research suggests that maybe we do have a pretty good handle on our own personalities after all. “It’s widely assumed that people have rose-coloured glasses on when they consider their own personality,” says Brian Connelly, an associate professor in U of T Scarborough’s Department of Management. […]

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Why women receive less CPR from bystanders

Concerns about inappropriate contact or causing injury may help explain why bystanders are less likely to perform CPR on women — even “virtual” women — than on men who collapse with cardiac arrest, according to two studies presented at the American Heart Association’s Resuscitation Science Symposium 2018, an international conference highlighting the best in cardiovascular […]

Health News

Wealthier people do less in the struggle against climate change

A collective-risk dilemma experiment with members of the public in Barcelona has shown that people are more or less likely to contribute money to fighting climate change depending on their how wealthy they are. And the results indicate that participants with fewer resources were prepared to contribute significantly more to the public good than wealthier […]

Health News

Binary bias distorts how we integrate information

When we evaluate and compare a range of data points — whether that data is related to health outcomes, head counts, or menu prices — we tend to neglect the relative strength of the evidence and treat it as simply binary, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological […]