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OK, I admit it.  I find Donald Trump's character to be pretty, well, disgusting. A new study agrees with me.  It says that a person's character , more so than their actions, determines whether we find immoral acts to be ‘disgusting,’ according to new research in Psychological Science , as reported by newswise.com.  “We wanted to know why moral transgressions can be disgusting even when they don’t involve the kinds of things that typically disgust us, like body products, insects, and rotting foods,” says psychological scientist and study co-author Hanah Chapman of Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. “We found that what drives moral disgust seems to be the character of the transgressor — who they are more so than what they do.” The worse someone’s character is, says Chapman, the more disgusting people typically find them to be. The research was prompted by differing findings regarding how our judgments of moral violations evoke specific emotio...

It certainly comes as no surprise but social media sites interfere with children's moral development. According to a new study, a "parent poll" carried out in the UK found that only 15% of parents thought that popular social media sites, such as Facebook, provided a positive influence on a young person’s character, while 40% of parents said they were "concerned" or "extremely concerned" about the negative and potentially harmful impact of social media. Even though it was carried out in the UK, it holds true for this country, as well.  The UK-wide poll questioned over 1,700 parents of children aged 11 to 17. Of those parents questioned, 93% said they were regular social media users, newswise.com reports. Researchers carried out this poll to gauge parents’ perceptions around the influence of social media on children’s character. The survey, which is the first of its type in the UK, provides a unique insight into the moral values that are...

Quick.  Which affects you more, a woman saying, "Help?"  Or a scream. Clearly we react more immediately to sounds, and that's just what a new study has found.  Human sounds convey emotions clearer and faster than words. It takes just one-tenth of a second for our brains to begin to recognize emotions conveyed by vocalizations, according to researchers from McGill, newswise.com reports. It doesn’t matter whether the non-verbal sounds are growls of anger, the laughter of happiness or cries of sadness. More importantly, the researchers have also discovered that we pay more attention when an emotion (such as happiness, sadness or anger) is expressed through vocalizations than we do when the same emotion is expressed in speech. The researchers believe that the speed with which the brain ‘tags’ these vocalizations and the preference given to them compared to language, is due to the potentially crucial role that decoding vocal sounds has played in human survival....

When our son was small, my husband and I used to fight all the time.  Who fed him last?  Who changed him?  Whose turn was it to go off by themselves for a while?  A lot of the time we yelled at each other until someone just gave up and walked away. But the most damaging fights were the ones when we stopped talking to each other.  Now a new study has found that the “silent treatment” can ruin a relationship. As a child, my mom pulled the same sort of thing.  She was great at withdrawing.  When I was older, I learned that it was from depression and numbing herself with alcohol and painkillers.  But she just wasn't there.  I learned to get around it but I'd have to say it affected me for life. They say you marry your mother (even women), and my husband, sad to say, used to share a lot of qualities with her.  It didn't take much to make him mad, and when it did, he would retreat into silence for sometimes days. I think we even went fo...

Here's another reason not to get angry.  A new study has found that there's a n early fivefold increase in risk for heart attack in the two hours following outbursts of anger. newswise.com quotes  lead author Elizabeth Mostofsky, MPH, ScD, a post-doctoral fellow in the cardiovascular epidemiological unit at BIDMC and an instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health ,  “There has been a lot of research on anger; we already know it can be unhealthy, but we wanted to quantify the risk, not just for heart attack, but for other potentially lethal cardiovascular events as well.  She notes that the study might help patients think more about how they manage anger in their everyday lives and encourage physicians to discuss medications and psychosocial supports with their patients for whom anger is an issue, especially patients with known cardiovascular risk factors. The study results showed that the risk of heart attack, with symptoms like chest pain, shortness of ...

If you're anything like me, if a doctor says something that insults  or embarrasses you, you may never go back, a new study has found. I can remember when I was lugging around 30 post-partum pounds and a new internist I was planning to start seeing told me I really needed to lose weight.  I dropped the pounds (he was actually my incentive to join Weight Watchers) but I never went back. But not everyone gives up on a doctor who challenges them.  Some people lie the next time they see the doctor ("Oh yes, I cut 'way back on my calories"), while others decide to draw the wagons around and take the advice. Shame and guilt as a direct result of interacting with a doctor are quite common, says Christine Harris, professor of psychology in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences, as are both positive and negative reactions at newswise.com.  Gaining insight into patient reactions is important, the she and her co-authors write, because “more than one third of all...

This article originally appeared in HealthyLife Connecticut magazine (and won first place in feature writing in the 2012 Society of Professional Journalists competition).       Laina and Jennifer had been friends since childhood. They'd approved each other's spouses, had children at the same time and taken family vacations together. They also shared their darkest secrets, including something for which Laina was very ashamed -- as a preteen she had shoplifted barrettes from a local store.   When Laina gave Jennifer as a reference for a job she really wanted, Jennifer told the recruiter about the shoplifting incident. Laina didn't get the job and felt she could never forgive Jennifer. Their lifetime friendship ended. If Jennifer had apologized to Laina, acknowledging she had done something wrong, this friendship might have had hope. But that didn't happen and the women parted on very bitter terms.   Forgiveness is something we all cons...