jgoldman

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week. To start things off, be sure to check out the "What is Mental Illness? Mini-Carnival" that I hosted at The Thoughtful Animal, which included entries from BPS Research Digest, Neurocritic, Neurotic Physiology, Psycasm, and myself.…

From the new National Geographic Great Migrations mini-series. Open comment thread: Did you watch it last night? What did you think?

Despite the fact that my research lies at the intersection between cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology, I am also quite interested in the evolution of our understanding of psychopathology. The ultimate goal of the study of psychopathology is to ground such disorders in brain and…

Welcome to the mental illness mini-carnival! Mental illness, or psychopathology, is a field riddled with controversy and it can be sometimes confusing to wade through all the uncertainty and conflicting data and opinions. In an effort to help make sense of some of it, your faithful psychology and…

"When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service!" Even in 1852, psychologists like Charles Mackay, who wrote those words in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, were well aware of the dangers of confirmation bias. I was…

I don't often get too personal on this blog, but today is an important day. Fifteen years ago, Israeli Prime Minster Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated after speaking at a peace rally in Tel Aviv in Kikar Malchei Yisrael (now called Kikar Rabin). I don't have very many flashbulb memories from my…

There is only one month left for submissions! Dig through your archives, through other people's archives and submit! I've already started to contact potential reviewers for this year's anthology. We're ready to roll! Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail Bora the corrected URLs…

Carnival of Evolution #29 is being hosted this month at Byte Size Biology. Click on the big green button for lots of evolutionary wonderfulness.

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: Another week of top-notch psychology and neuroscience blogging! Should captive cephalopods be kept in "enriched" environments? Mike Lisieski of the Cephalove blog says yes: "Generally, providing enrichment for captive cephalopods…

In March 2000, Dr. Simon Chapman and colleagues from the University of Sydney published a paper in which they assessed the effectiveness of an educational intervention for the prevention of dog bites in children. "Prevent-a-Bite" is an educational programme designed for primary school children.…

A nice video from our friends at BBC Earth: ...although I'm not sure why some of the critters in there qualify as scary. In any case, have a Happy (and Safe!) Halloween!

Meet Rio. Rio is a California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus). She was born in captivity at Marine World in Northern California, and due to insufficient maternal care from her biological mother, she was transferred to the Long Marine Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz when she was just a few days old.…

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week. This was an awesome week for psychology and neuroscience blogging! I had a hard time picking just three or four, so here are six: Korsakoff's Syndrome is a fascinating neuropsychiatric disorder marked by fantastic stories, told by…

Have you ever been walking through the forest and thought to yourself, "Damn, its loud here...it's really, really hard to hear anything anybody else is saying"? Well, maybe that's what prompted Terry J. Ord and Judy A. Stamps, respectively from Harvard and UC Davis to investigate lizard exercise…

Last night, I was a guest of the National Geographic Channel at the historic Saban Theater in Beverly Hills for the United States premiere of Great Migrations, which airs internationally on Sunday, November 7. Great Migrations is a 7-part TV "event," paired with an issue of National Geographic…

Check out this awesome David Attenborough video: So far the readers of this fair blog have managed to fully fund two Donors Choose science education requests. We can do better. Do you like the stuff that you read here? Do you like David Attenborough? Consider donating to this project. Mr. T…

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: "Amazingly, babies as small as 12 months old show some understanding of the difference between the deliberate and goal-directed "agents" that can cause order, such as a person, and those randomly acting inanimate objects that cannot…

In 1975, Edward Tronick and colleagues first presented the "still face experiment" to colleagues at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. He described a phenomenon in which an infant, after three minutes of "interaction" with a non-responsive expressionless mother…

Non-human primate, that is. Ape actor Peter Elliott shares his knowledge of chimpanzee and gorilla vocabulary and facial expressions. via IMDb: Peter Elliott is the film industry's primary primate. He both as a performer, in films like Missing Link and The Island of Doctor Moreau, and as a…

Does Fido see the cup as half full? Is your dog pessimistic? Last time we saw headlines like these they were about a certain barnyard animal. Remember "Pampered pigs 'feel optimistic'"? I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. Roughly half of the population of dogs in the UK are likely to…

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: "Young children are little scientists. They instinctively stretch, prod, observe and categorise the world's offerings." Christian Jarrett at BPS Research Digest discusses how early children can be exposed to scientific ideas. Dr.…

...by DeLene Beeland, for the Raleigh News Observer and the Charlotte Observer (same interview, two papers).

Every year the science blogging community organizes the "Science Bloggers for Students challenge", a month-long competition between science blogs to see which raise do the most to help low-income science classrooms through the DonorsChoose.org website. Through Donors Choose, teachers can go and…

This one is worth watching all the way through: (h/t Sara) And, from the sublime to the mundane: (h/t Dr. Kiki)

I showed this video today as an intro to my 8-week "mini-course" on Canine Cognition. In it, narrator John Lithgow presents two slightly different versions of the dog domestication story. The first version is essentially the Belyaev story: young wolves would be adopted into the camps of early…

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week: "So, sometimes we settle for less than George Clooney or Heidi Klum." Casey Rentz at The Lay Scientist asks do we REALLY want what we say we want, when it comes to choosing mates? Travis Saunders of Obesity Panacea asks: Which…

Whether you're a dog, a cat, or a grad student who hasn't been home to shower for a few days, fleas are a major problem. They make skin itch. And NOTHING is worse than itchy skin. But... Do you know WHERE the fleas are? Where they like to hang out and guard their little flea eggs? Where's the…

Science Someone had to ask it. Why do squirrels masturbate? Obviously, it's a piece by Ed. Sentiment-sensing software could aid in weeding hostile online comments. If this comes to pass, I imagine most of Physioprof's comments will be weeded out, sadly. An important new study of mirror self-…

Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you…

The National Institutes of Health announced that by 2011 it will transfer almost two hundred chimpanzees from the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico to a lab in San Antonio, Texas, lab for use in invasive research. In 1995, the NIH announced a moratorium on the breeding of chimps in…