Thursday, December 31, 2015

Negative evaluation of counterstereotypical people by conservatives maintains their sense of certainty

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Yet another study on differences in the psychology of conservative and liberal individuals: People frequently use physical appearance ster...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Dorsal and Ventral Right Brain Pathways for Prosody

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Sammler et al. show that analysis of the emotional content, or vocal tone, of our speech is processed in dorsal and ventral streams of the ...
Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Brain mitochondria function links anxiety with social subordination.

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Hollis et al. make the fascinating observation that position in the social hierarchy of rats (dominant versus submissive) can be enhanced o...
Monday, December 28, 2015

Socioeconomic status, inflammatory reactivity, and social support.

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Interesting work from John-Henderson et al. , who suggest that social support is more effective in damping stress responses in people having...
Friday, December 25, 2015

The need for affiliation - communities of kindness

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I belong to the Gay Men's Chorus of South Florida, which completed a series of five Christmas season concerts over the past two weeks. S...
Thursday, December 24, 2015

Empathy is a choice, and can be trained.

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I want to pass on some clips from a review by Cameron et al. that summarizes, and has links to, a number of studies that deal our ability t...
Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Male and female brains do not constitute two distinct categories.

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From Zoel et al.: Significance Sex/gender differences in the brain are of high social interest because their presence is typically assumed...
Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Good news for the grumpy.

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A dogma of the self-help and happiness industries is that unhappiness decreases health and longevity. Happy people are supposed to live long...
Monday, December 21, 2015

Loneliness hurts.

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Reynolds points to an article by Cacioppo et. al. , who contribute to a special issue of Cortex magazine on Neuro-cognitive mechanisms of s...
Friday, December 18, 2015

A special issue of Science Magazine on aging.

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You can see titles and abstracts of articles here . And, I want to pass on a section of one of the articles, “ Healthy aging: The ultimate ...
Thursday, December 17, 2015

Exercise helps your brain rewire.

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Our brains are most capable of changing in response to experience when we are young, then this ability abruptly declines into adulthood. Lu...
Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Why doesn't economic growth lead to more happiness?

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This is the Easterlin paradox, which I have mentioned in a previous post . Oishi and Kesebir now do an interesting analysis showing that e...
Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Modest exercise gives maximum health benefits.

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Gretchen Reynolds points to a study in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings that reviews studies published in PubMed since 2000 that included at le...
1 comment:
Monday, December 14, 2015

Coffee consumption correlates with lower risk of dying.

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From Nicholas Bakalar , who notes a study showing that people who drink more coffee have a reduced risk of death - a correlation (not nece...
2 comments:
Friday, December 11, 2015

Exercise enhances frontal brain lateralization characteristic of younger brains.

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As we age beyond 40 years or so, mental tasks that require attention, problem solving, decision-making and other types of high-level thinkin...
Thursday, December 10, 2015

Mindfulness meditation and pain reduction.

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An interesting analysis from Zeidan et al. : SIGNIFICANCE Recent findings have demonstrated that mindfulness meditation significantly re...
Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Gender bias in the attribution of creativity

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Slightly edited abstract from Proudfoot et al. , who provide further examples of gender discrimination: We propose that the propensity to ...
Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Lower leg power predicts cognitive aging.

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Gretchen Reynolds points to a study of 162 healthy female twin pairs , some identical, and some not, who 10 years previously had completed ...
Monday, December 07, 2015

Racial bias and time perception.

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From Moskowitz et al. : Arousal is known to shape time perception, and heightened arousal causes one to perceive that time has slowed (i.e....
Friday, December 04, 2015

Cultural specificity of human fairness.

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Blake et al. do an interesting experiment on how sensitive children are to inequality. They asked one child in a pair or to accept or rejec...