Cuddle Parties

Cuddlers engage in a ‘puppy pile’ or a big group hug with all of the cuddle party participants. Cuddle Parties are non-sexual events where adults get together for safe, playful interaction. There are strict rules: no alcohol, no nudity and no “dry humping”. Party-goers must ask permission to touch one another and have the right to refuse anytime. [More]

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Survey: People with Psychosis Prefer Bush

Our friends over at the New Haven Advocate pointed out an interesting finding when a local social work master’s student at Souther Connecticut State University went on a “get out the vote” effort in 2004 targeted at people with mental illness to vote. He found people with psychosis were more likely to vote for Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

Wisely, Lohse attributed the preference to a person with psychosis’s preference to an ordered environment and world aorund them:

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’” [More]

 

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New Advice: Don’t Sit Up Straight

The longstanding advice to “sit up straight” has been turned on its head by a new study that suggests leaning back is a much better posture.

A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal,” said study author, Waseem Amir Bashir, a researcher at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada. “Sitting in a sound anatomic position is essential, since the strain put on the spine and its associated ligaments over time can lead to pain, deformity and chronic illness.” [More]

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Elephant Self-Awareness Mirrors Humans

‘Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining only humans, apes and dolphins as animals that possess this kind of self-awareness, researchers now report.

“This would seem to be a trait common to and independently evolved by animals with large, complex brains, complex social lives and known capacities for empathy and altruism, even though the animals all have very different kinds of brains,” researcher Diana Reiss, a senior cognitive research scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Brooklyn, N.Y., told LiveScience.

Hopefully, she added, this will encourage people to protect elephants.’

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How the Web Prevents Rape

‘Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, “More Net access, less rape.” A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.’

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