Religion has dominated the social and political landscape of the world for millennia—but why? What separates a believer from a non-believer? Steven Reiss, a professor emeritus of psychology at The Ohio State University, believes he knows what separates different kinds of believers. After more than 20 years of studying human motivation, he has determined that the motivation to seek religion is not thanks to a fear of death or a desire to be moral, but rather to something much broader—our basic human desires. "It's not just about fear of death. Religion couldn't achieve mass acceptance if >>>

By SAM KITTERMAN Prof. Stephen J. Ceci and Prof. Wendy M. Williams, human development, have responded to a paper in the most recent edition of Brain and Behavioral Sciences that suggests the ideological makeup of social psychologists has gone too far left. Stephen J. Ceci The paper — written by a team of five liberal-identified social psychologists including José L. Duarte, Arizona State University, psychology — reports that the proportion of self-described liberals to conservatives in psychology is currently around 12 to 1, up from the 4 to 1 ratio preceding the 1990s. The authors posit three >>>

Once again, we’ve had yet another mass shooting in the US. That the previous sentence can even be written in a serious manner is a bleak summary of the situation. Even President Obama has clearly lost patience with the regularity of such horrific occurrences. As ever, the fallout includes endless scapegoating, political posturing and analysis. It all boils down to a large number of people not wanting to lose their guns under any circumstances. Those opposed to gun control regularly site the second amendment, granting US citizens the right to bear arms. But having the right to do something doesn’t >>>

Posted by Kory Cerjak October 6, 2015 at 05:00 PM Hanshin Kōshien Stadium It’s October! Oktoberfest beers have already been on the shelves for a few months in some cases (don’t they know when to stop? It’s madness!!), but more importantly, the Major League Baseball playoffs have begun. My team, Chicago’s south side White Sox, fell pretty quickly out of the gate after the All Star break—not that they were doing that well to begin with—but there’s 10 teams at the onset of the playoffs that could theoretically make it to the World >>>

The Right Wrong Thing by Ellen Kirschman is now available in hardcover (ISBN: 9781608091546, List Price: $26.95, 260 pages, Mystery) and all digital/ebook formats (ISBN: 9781608091553, List Price: $14.95) through your favorite independent bookstore, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Apple iTunes, kobo.com, and Google Books. Ask for this terrific novel through your local public library. The Story: Officer Randy Spelling had always wanted to be a police officer, to follow in the footsteps of her brothers and her father. Not long after joining the force, she mistakenly shoots and kills Lakeisha Gibbs, >>>

Daily fantasy sports (DFS) games — run by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, the two leaders in that industry — are legally classified as games of skill rather than online gambling. That’s why they’re allowed to operate, even though online gambling is not legal in the US. But as the New York Times reported Monday, that world is now being rocked by “what amounted to allegations of insider trading, that employees [of the main companies] were placing bets on information not available to the public.” This scandal raises many ethical and legal issues. One that’s >>>

Tuesday, October 06, 2015 UNCW psychology graduate students, led by Professor Sally MacKain, will apply their research skills to aid Brunswick County officials in evaluating a program designed to help people struggling with mental health or drug abuse problems. Brunswick County was recently awarded a $975,000 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grant to expand its innovative Treatment Courts program. The county will receive the federal funds over a three-year period. MacKain and her team of psychology graduate students assisted with the grant proposal and have >>>

At nearly the same moment as last week's mass shooting in Roseburg, Ore., an ominous, coincidental reverberation of that commonplace American theme -- school shootings -- broke across my own community college campus, here in south Texas. I was talking with a student in a deserted classroom after the last class of the week when my college's security alert system passed the word that the campus was being reinforced by local police in response to a threat made against a student. Within a few minutes two colleagues stuck their heads into the classroom to make sure we'd gotten the word. No one panicked >>>

“No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá. (I’m not from here, nor from there).” The above sentence is a common phrase uttered by second-generation Latinos living in the United States. These individuals often feel that that they fit in with neither American society nor the country of their parents. Christopher Norton has felt this way much of his life. Norton, one of the inaugural students in the Latino Psychology Concentration at DU’s Graduate School of Professional Psychology, is excited about the opportunity to connect with his heritage while making a difference for Spanish-speaking community >>>

An over-reliance on mobile devices and the internet has led to us using our brains far less than our ancestors, which greatly impacts our ability to create and store long-term memories, psychology experts and a security firm are warning.Think about how many phone numbers you know today, and how many you used to know 15 years ago. If you grew up before mobile phones became mainstream, you probably knew your home phone number, those of a few of your closest friends, and probably the number to reach a family member at work.You could probably also recite your home address off by heart, and you might >>>