Atlas City Project

Since we are starting a newsletter I figured we could use a section for everyone to add topics and articles they feel are relevant. Please also leave a brief description and not just a link due to many articles being very extensive and it takes a lot of time to go through them all. If you feel like you have the skills, you may want to write a little few hundred word article summarizing what you found that can be put in the paper.

Thanks to Brett



Research shows what you say about others says a lot about you
August 2, 2010

How positively you see others is linked to how happy, kind-hearted and emotionally stable you are, according to new research by a Wake Forest University psychology professor.

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"Your perceptions of others reveal so much about your own personality," says Dustin Wood, assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest and lead author of the study, about his findings. By asking study participants to each rate positive and negative characteristics of just three people, the researchers were able to find out important information about the rater's well-being, mental health, social attitudes and how they were judged by others.
The study appears in the July issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Peter Harms at the University of Nebraska and Simine Vazire of Washington University in St. Louis co-authored the study.
The researchers found a person's tendency to describe others in positive terms is an important indicator of the positivity of the person's own personality traits. They discovered particularly strong associations between positively judging others and how enthusiastic, happy, kind-hearted, courteous, emotionally stable and capable the person describes oneself and is described by others.
"Seeing others positively reveals our own positive traits," Wood says.
The study also found that how positively you see other people shows how satisfied you are with your own life, and how much you are liked by others.
In contrast, negative perceptions of others are linked to higher levels of narcissism and antisocial behavior. "A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively," Wood says. "The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders." Given that negative perceptions of others may underlie several personality disorders, finding techniques to get people to see others more positively could promote the cessation of behavior patterns associated with several different personality disorders simultaneously, Wood says.
This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing. The level of negativity the rater uses in describing the other person may indeed indicate that the other person has negative characteristics, but may also be a tip off that the rater is unhappy, disagreeable, neurotic—or has other negative personality traits.
Raters in the study consisted of friends rating one another, college freshmen rating others they knew in their dormitories, and fraternity and sorority members rating others in their organization. In all samples, participants rated real people and the positivity of their ratings were found to be associated with the participant's own characteristics.
By evaluating the raters and how they evaluated their peers again one year later, Wood found compelling evidence that how positively we tend to perceive others in our social environment is a highly stable trait that does not change substantially over time.

Provided by Wake Forest University

Psychology in the Prescription Era: Building a Firewall Between Marketing and Science

By: David O. Antonuccio and William G. Danton

Great psych paper on medications being unethically thrust into our population and why. Also, how to get real information about what you are taking.

Interesting Quotes/Stats:

“it has been estimated that as many as 100,000 hospitalized patients die each year in the United States from adverse prescription drug reactions (Lazarou, Pemeranz, & Corey, 1998). In an ambulatory clinical setting, adverse drug events are common and often preventable (Gandhi et al., 2003), especially among elderly patients (Gurwitz et al., 2003; Juurlink, Mamdani, Kopp, Laupacis, & Redelmeier, 2003). Some harmful reactions cannot be foreseen because the medications are only tested on an average of 3,000 people prior to approval, causing a reliance on postmarketing data to identify less common reactions (Friedman, 2002). Up to 20% of approved drugs subsequently require a new black box warning about life-threatening drug reactions or are withdrawn from the market” (Antonuccio, 2003).

“According to IMS Health, the industry spent more than $19 billion in 2001 in U.S. advertising alone. The pharmaceutical industry spent almost $200 million on lobbying and campaign contributions in 1999 and 2000, more than any other industry (Wayne & Petersen, 2001). The industry has more lobbyists than there are members of congress (Wayne & Petersen, 2001), and it underwrites about 70% of all clinical drug trials in the United States (DeAngelis, Fontanarosa, & Flanagin, 2001)” (Antonuccio, 2003).