Research roundup

• Adults over 50 who feel comfortable about aging are more proactive in getting preventive health-care services, finds a study by University of Michigan psychology doctoral student Eric Kim. He examined data about the use of preventive health services from more than 6,000 older adults and found that people who reported higher satisfaction with aging were more likely to have their cholesterol tested and get regular colonoscopies over time. Women comfortable with aging received mammograms and Pap smears with greater frequency, and men made medical appointments more often to get prostate exams, according to findings. One area that did not improve based on aging satisfaction: getting a flu shot (Preventive Medicine, December).
• People who are prone to delusions make quick decisions, according to a study led by Leslie van der Leer, a psychology doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Researchers assigned participants a computer task in which they observed the color of a black or white fish caught from one of two lakes and then asked them to choose whether to see more fish or decide which lake the fish came from. Each participant was rewarded for choosing the correct lake but lost points for asking to see more fish. Participants also completed a questionnaire measuring how prone they were to delusions. The results showed that the more delusion-prone the participants were, the earlier they chose a lake. Those who were highly prone to delusions chose a lake before they had sufficient information to make a decision that was likely to be accurate (Psychological Medicine, online Oct. 2).
• What we believed as children about the soul and the afterlife shapes what we believe as adults, regardless of what we say we believe now, according to a study by Stephanie Anglin, a Rutgers University psychology doctoral student. Anglin asked 348 undergraduates to remember what they believed about the soul and afterlife at age 10 and to report about their beliefs now. She also used the Implicit Association Test to gauge participants' implicit beliefs. Each participant saw two words paired at the top of a computer screen, such as "soul" paired with either "real" or "fake" to gauge beliefs about the soul, or "soul" paired with either "eternal" or "death" to address beliefs about the afterlife. A series of words then flashed on the screen, and the participants indicated by pressing a key whether each word fit with the two words above. Based on these responses, Anglin concluded that the participants' implicit beliefs about the soul and the afterlife were close to their childhood beliefs. But those implicit beliefs were often very different from their current explicit beliefs — what they said they believed now (British Journal of Social Psychology, online Oct. 31).
• Depressed people typically believe that life gets better, according to a study co-led by Emily Peck, a psychology graduate student at Acadia University. The researchers analyzed data from a sample of middle-aged Americans, looking at demographics, life satisfaction for the past, present and future and depression symptoms. They found that adults who had histories of depression tended to evaluate their past and current lives more negatively than did adults without depression, but this negativity did not extend to their beliefs about the future (Clinical Psychological Science, online Oct. 17).
• People who have been in prison run a significantly higher risk of committing suicide compared with the general population, according to research by Axel Haglund, a doctoral student at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The study compared nearly 27,000 people released from prison between 2005 and 2009 to 27,000 control subjects who had never been in prison, matched for sex and age. Haglund found that people who had been released from prison were 18 times more likely than the control group to commit suicide. Haglund also found that the highest risk of suicide comes in the first months after release and among people with histories of substance abuse and previous suicide attempts (Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, October).
• Consuming alcohol makes men more responsive to the smiles of others, finds a study led by University of Pittsburgh psychology doctoral student Catharine Fairbairn. The researchers randomly assigned 720 healthy social drinkers in their 20s to receive a particular drink: an alcoholic beverage, a non-alcoholic beverage or a non-alcoholic placebo beverage that was described as alcoholic. Beverages were continually doled out over time, and participants were told to drink them at an even rate. Researchers then examined video recordings to follow the spread of smiles from one individual in a group to the next. They found that alcohol significantly increased the contagiousness of smiles, but only for all-male groups. Alcohol did not have a significant effect on emotional contagion for groups with women. Smiles were also associated with increased positive mood and social bonding, as well as decreased negative mood. The other drinks did not have such effects (Clinical Psychological Science, online Sept. 26).

— Amy Novotney