When a child has a medical problem, doctors see the child and parent together. It would be unusual to have a clinician meet alone with a minor with an illness or injury or a regular check-up. But this situation is reversed in child psychology.

Does playing violent video games make players aggressive? It is a question that has taxed researchers, sociologists, and regulators ever since the first console was plugged into a TV and the first shots fired in a shoot ‘em up game.

Writing today in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is scant scientific evidence that video games are anything but harmless and do not lead to real world aggression. Moreover, his research shows that previous work is biased towards the opposite conclusion.

Video games have come a long way since the simplistic ping-pong and cascade games of the early 1970s, the later space-age Asteroids and Space Invaders, and the esoteric Pac-man. Today, severed limbs, drive-by shootings, and decapitated bodies captivate a new generation of gamers and gruesome scenes of violence and exploitation are common.

We all know that children who are popular do well socially. A new study has found that teenagers who feel good about themselves and are comfortable with their peers can also be socially successful without being popular in the traditional sense.

These findings come from researchers at the University of Virginia and are published in the May/June 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

Researchers studied 164 adolescents from racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse backgrounds. The teens were interviewed at age 13 and then again at 14. The researchers also interviewed the adolescents’ same-sex close friends.

Martin Fischer, University of Dundee, Scotland, recently reported results showing that the majority of adults prefer to start counting on their left hand, regardless of whether they are left- or right-handed. In a subsequent odd-even task, the left-starters had more consistent spatial-numerical associations than the right-starters.

A new revision of clinical guidelines to help doctors manage patients with depression has challenged the rationale behind the UK government’s policy of rolling out of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for milder depression.

According to a comprehensive review of treatments for depression, there is a lack of evidence for CBT being more helpful than other forms of psychological support in mild depression or for its efficacy in severe depression. There is also good evidence for antidepressants being effective in depression, with benefit increasing the more severe the depression. This is contrary to recent reports that antidepressants don’t work except in the most severe depression.

Dr Ian Anderson, Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Neuroscience and Psychiatry Unit, University of Manchester, UK, says the cost effectiveness of CBT should be thoroughly investigated before it is adopted more widely because it is likely to be offered to people with milder depression where the evidence is poorest.

Not long ago, Howard Wainer, a statistician I mentioned recently, learned that his blood sugar was too high. His doctor told him to lose weight or risk losing his sight. He quickly lost about 50 pounds, which put him below 200 pounds. He also started making frequent measurements of his blood sugar, on the order of 6 times per day, with the goal of keeping it low.

It was obvious to him that the conventional (meter-supplied) analysis of these measurements could be improved. The conventional analysis emphasized means. You could get the mean of your last n (20?) readings, for example. That told you how well you were doing, but didn’t help you do better.

Howard, who had written a book about graphical discovery, made a graph: blood sugar versus time. It showed that his measurements could be divided into three parts:

Jean Piaget, founder of genetic epistemology and key researcher in child development psychology, showed that kids attribute “life status” to all things that move on their own, like bikes or clouds, and even 10-year-olds have difficulty understanding the nature of a 'living' thing.

Understanding the concept of a living thing is a late developmental achievement, he stated.

New research by Northwestern University psychologist Florencia Anggoro and colleagues Sandra Waxman and Doug Medin proposes that the way in which “alive” and other biological concepts are named within a given language also shapes their understanding and acquisition in children.

The researchers compared children ages 4 to 9 speaking English and Indonesian, a pair of languages with an intriguing difference - in English, but not Indonesian, the term 'animal' is polysemous, or has more than one meaning: one sense includes all animate objects (the animal kingdom) while the other excludes humans (‘don’t eat like an animal!’)

From the war room to the board room, negotiations are a part of everyday life. Successful negotiations demand a clear understanding of one’s opponent. But what approach should one take to achieve such an understanding of one’s opponent in everyday negotiations?

Psychologist Adam Galinsky from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and colleagues William Maddux (INSEAD), Debra Gilin (St. Mary’s U.), and Judith White (Dartmouth) asked a similar question and found that success in negotiations depends on focusing on the head and not the heart. In other words, it is better to take the perspective of negotiation opponents rather than empathize with them.

Looking on the bright side can lead to irresponsible financial behavior, says Elizabeth Cowley from the University of Sydney. In a series of studies, Cowley examined repeated gambling in the face of loss. She finds that people often engage in too much positive thinking, selectively focusing on one win among hundreds of losses when they think back on the overall experience.

“When we want to justify engaging in an activity which could potentially be irresponsible – like gambling – we may need to distort our memory of the past to rationalize the decision,” Cowley explains. “People who have frequently spent more money than planned on gambling edit their memories of the past in order to justify gambling again.”

Suitors can tell a young person’s attitude toward sexual relationships by the look on their face, according to new research which researchers say gives deeper insight into mate attractiveness.

The study of 700 heterosexual participants also found that young men and women look for complete opposites when it comes to relationships with the other sex.

In no great shock to anyone who is now or has ever been young, men generally prefer women who they perceive are open to short-term sexual relationships whilst women are usually interested in men who appear to have potential to be long-term relationship material.