Friday, December 30, 2011

Friends with benefits - pet ownership and well-being

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My two abyssinian cats and I agree with the (obvious) results of this study by Harmon-Jones et al. : Social support is critical for psychol...
2 comments:
Thursday, December 29, 2011

Local Jekyll and global Hyde - duality of face perception

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Miellet et al. make the curious observation that we can identify faces with either focused foveal global (peripheral) vision: The main con...
Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Leaning to the left makes an object seem smaller.

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From Eerland et al. , here is yet another neat example of embodied cognition, how a body state can influence "objective" estimatio...
Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently.

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A colleague pointed me to this interesting (to me, because I'm a pianist) work by Sohee Park's laboratory at Vanderbilt. Their cent...
1 comment:
Monday, December 26, 2011

Good minus God - distrust of atheists

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Gervais et al offer yet another study on us poor atheists. I follow their abstract with some comments on such studies: Recent polls indica...
3 comments:
Friday, December 23, 2011

Prosocial behavior as intrinsic to our brains in absence of social pressure

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Zaki and Mitchell question the evolutionary and economic models assume that humans are fundamentally selfish and perform altruistic behavio...
Thursday, December 22, 2011

Single nucleotide change in oxytocin receptor gene decreases stress relief by social support.

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In recent years, the human oxytocin system has been increasingly studied as essential to our prosocial behavior and also buffering stress. O...
4 comments:
Wednesday, December 21, 2011

A face only an investor could love...

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Here is a quirky item, a bit of a stretch but curious. Given that psychological traits are thought to relate to effective leadership, Wong e...
Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Our mindreading of another person depends on how much skin we see!

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This interesting piece in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology makes observations on how our mindreading, or inferring someone&...
4 comments:
Monday, December 19, 2011

Why do humans collaborate so much?

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Chimpanzees apparently have the cognitive skills needed to be a good collaborator. They recognize and attend to other's goals and unders...
4 comments:
Friday, December 16, 2011

Video at the speed of light.

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The N.Y. Times points to extraordinary work that captures the image of a light pulse moving through an object, vastly faster than previous ...

Taming human conflicts in the real world

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Alexander and Christia provide a social psychology experiment that doesn't use Western undergraduate psychology students as subjects! ...
Thursday, December 15, 2011

Our biological immune system activates our behavioral immune system.

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Viewing disease cues (skin lesions, someone sneezing) leads people to display a heightened biological immune response (for example, stimulat...
3 comments:
Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Heirarchies of empathy in the brain

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Following the previous post I thought it would be useful to pass on more of Panskepp's review, which provides a more general description...
3 comments:

Empathy in rats - a great video

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Bartal et al. show yet another example of how the kind of empathic concern humans can show for others is already developed in the rat, a muc...
Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Chemical and social mechanisms of self healing.

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Two fascinating recent articles deal with the power we seem to have to heal ourselves by believing that a particular faith, meditation, or p...
2 comments:
Monday, December 12, 2011

Perfecting the not quite perfect

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I pass on this interesting item by Peter Stern from the Editor's choice section of Science Magazine: Even the best musicians make sligh...
1 comment:
Friday, December 09, 2011

REM sleep chills out amygdala, reduces emotional reactivity

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van der Helm et al. at Univ. of Cal. Berkeley have done interesting experiments in which 34 adults were randomly assigned to two groups whi...
3 comments:

How exercise benefits the brain - importance of BNDF

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Gretchen Reynolds summarizes several experiments demonstrating that exercise stimulates synthesis of brain derived neurotropic factor (BNDF...
2 comments:
Thursday, December 08, 2011

Psychopathy correlates with reduced prefrontal connectivity.

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Psychopathy, defined as callous and impulsive antisocial behavior, is present in approximately a quarter of adult prison inmates. For many y...