Friday, September 28, 2012

Just so stories about the evolution of our minds.

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I want to point to a very nicely done review in The New Yorker by Anthony Gottlieb, who notes a number of recent books dealing with evolut...
4 comments:
Thursday, September 27, 2012

Voting patterns: “I” value competence but “we” value social competence

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(Chen et al. ask whether judgments of candidates' social competence—defined as the capacity for effective functioning in social interac...
Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Combat stress causes long term changes in brain connectivity.

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Sobering results from Wingen et al. : Prolonged stress can have long-lasting effects on cognition. Animal models suggest that deficits in ...
Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Male sex hormones alter the brain after exercise.

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Numerous experiments have shown that exercise enhances our ability to remember and think, and causes formation of new nerve cells. A collabo...
2 comments:
Monday, September 24, 2012

On being nothing...

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The "Opinionater" feature of the New York Times has "Anxiety" as one of its topics inviting online essays. I wanted to p...
Friday, September 21, 2012

Signing beforehand increases honesty.

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Here is a fascinating simple study by Shu et al. Simply signing a statement of honesty at the top rather the bottom of a form makes you mor...
1 comment:

A personal history.

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I thought I would mention that in response to several requests from friends and family I have now posted a personal history on my dericbownd...
Thursday, September 20, 2012

Distinct prefrontal areas regulating cognitive control and value decisions.

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A massive study involving workers at five different universities has utilized a dataset on brain lesions accumulated over many decades to ...
Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Motivation influences how time flies when you’re having fun.

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Numerous studies have shown that a positive state, relative to a negative state, makes time appear to pass more quickly and causes assessmen...
Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Neural signature of affiliative emotions.

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Moll et al. do an interesting study to experimentally disentangle affiliative experience from general emotional valence, by demonstrating t...
Monday, September 17, 2012

Do implicit attitudes predict actual voting behavior?

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How can psychologists and pollsters predict the voting behavior of undecided voters? Is there is any hope for us Obama supporters who worry...
3 comments:
Friday, September 14, 2012

Psychological distance enhances conformity to group norms.

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In yet another of one of those studies that give what would appear to be a generally applicable result, but is based on experiments carried ...
Thursday, September 13, 2012

Zero effect of caloric restriction on lifespan

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I would be very surprised if there were any blog readers who are unaware of this material, released two weeks ago with saturation coverage b...
1 comment:
Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Cognitive load disrupts implicit theory of mind processing.

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I'm passing this on because I was totally unaware of the implicit theory of mind (TOM) system that is explained in these clips from the ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Why the sex gap in affective disorders?

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Here is an abstract from Hu et al. , which I pass on to you even though it is rather technical, that shows that an increase in negative affe...
Monday, September 10, 2012

Investing in Karma - When Wanting Promotes Helping

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An interesting piece from Converse et al. provides reliable evidence that people do good deeds when they want something beyond their contro...
Friday, September 07, 2012

Alcohol and group formation.

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Sayette et al. do what looks like a thorough piece of work, but I also have a "Duh...tell us something else we didn't already know...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 06, 2012

Where thinking about thinking happens in the brain.

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We evaluate and alter the cognitive functions we perform, as when we revise or edit our writing or speaking. This monitoring and controlling...
Wednesday, September 05, 2012

The unimaginable complexity of our evolved human systems.

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In the face of all the current hubris about redesigning and engineering humans using modern genetic and biochemical tools, trying to reverse...
2 comments:
Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Mapping discrete and dimensional emotions onto the brain.

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Here I am passing on the abstract and one summary figure from a useful recent review article by Stephan Hamann: A longstanding controvers...