Psychology
edyong | January 8, 2009Picture the scene - you sit in a room with two other people, one white and one black, waiting for a psychological test. As the black person leaves to use their mobile phone, they bump the knee of the white person on their way out. While they're gone, the white person turns to you and says, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that." How would you feel? Would you be shocked? Angry? Indifferent? And would you want to work with that person later?
This was the scenario that Kerry Kawakami from York University used to try and understand the state of race relations in 21st century America.…
amillikan | January 6, 2009Recently, a discussion has sparked on ScienceBlogs over how the word "addiction," could be used to describe some substances that aren't necessarily harmful such as antidepressants. Scicurious from Neurotopia points out that if a substance changes one's physical self, there will be physical effects if that drug is discontinued—a property of addiction. Likewise, PalMD from Denialism Blog suspects the negative nature of the word "addiction" may make drug companies hesitant to describe their products as such, even though it's accurate.
edyong | January 3, 2009
When battles are waged over values and ideologies, you can't bribe or reason your way to peace. That's the stark message from a new psychological study of people in the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The fight over the land of Israel/Palestine has raged for over a century and the peace process has been difficult, lengthy and often stagnant. All the while, lives continue to be lost in skirmishes and suicide attacks, as the past weeks have painfully demonstrated. Perhaps it's time to put the situation under some scientific scrutiny.
A huge number of modern conflicts are…
clock | January 1, 2009The Psychology of Cyberspace is a course taught by John Suler in the Department of Psychology at the Science and Technology Center at Rider University. The website is a collection of a large number of thought-provoking essays on various aspects of human behavior online:
This hypertext book explores the psychological aspects of environments created by computers and online networks. It presents an evolving conceptual framework for understanding how people react to and behave within cyberspace: what I call "the psychology of cyberspace" - or simply "cyberpsychology." Continually being revised…
purepedantry | December 29, 2008My suspicion is that many of you went home for the holidays, and my suspicion is that many of you were not entirely honest with your relatives while you were there. While it is not my intention to encourage this behavior -- I, of course, am totally honest all of the time ;) -- you are not alone. Here is a great article from the NYTimes about the prevalence of lying:
Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called "lying in day-to-day life," Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of…
amillikan | December 27, 2008This week's Bloggingheads.tv episode features philosopher Joshua Knobe and psychologist Elizabeth Spelke discussing the cognitive abilities of infants.
Here are some more clips of the "diavlog" in addition to the one you can view on the ScienceBlogs home page.
What do you think of this week's Bloggingheads feature?
edyong | December 27, 2008
"Control - you must learn control!" These wise words were uttered by no less a sage than Yoda, and while he was talking about telekinetically hoisting spacecraft, having control has another important benefit. It protects a person from spotting false patterns that aren't there, from believing in conspiracies and from developing superstitions.
Control and security are vital parts of our psychological well-being and it goes without saying that losing them can feel depressing or scary. As such, people have strategies for trying to regain a sense control even if it's a tenuous one. Jennifer…
clock | December 25, 2008Larry, Amanda, John, Mike and others are comenting, quite positively, on the recent Scientific American article - Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology by David J. Buller. And I agree - this is an excellent, well-deserved and well-thought smack-down of Evolutionary Psychology and I am happy that it appears in a popular magazine and is spreading around the blogosphere.
The Fallacy 1 - Analysis of Pleistocene Adaptive Problems Yields Clues to the Mind's Design - is my favourite counter-argument when I hear someone offering an EvoPsych-style Just-So-Story, but the other three just as…
razib | December 21, 2008Even Bernard Madoff Doesn't Deserve This:Remember Jeffrey Skilling? Losses to Enron shareholders of more than $1 billion largely determined his 24-year-plus sentence. Or consider WorldCom's former chief, Bernard J. Ebbers. He got 25 years based principally on the $2.2 billion loss suffered by his company's shareholders. Sure, these men destroyed enormous shareholder value, just as the targets of today's criminal cases allegedly did. But it's hard to contend that they deserved prison terms longer than the average sentence for murder (22 years), kidnapping (14) and sexual abuse (eight)."
What…
razib | December 16, 2008A correspondent forward me this paper, The intelligence-religiosity nexus: A representative study of white adolescent Americans:
The present study examined whether IQ relates systematically to denomination and income within the framework of the g nexus, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97). Atheists score 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. Denominations differ significantly in IQ and income. Religiosity declines between ages 12 to 17. It is suggested…
grrlscientist | December 13, 2008tags: hypomania, bipolar disorder, manic depression, mood disorders, mental health, psychology
Image: Michael Witte/NYTimes [larger view].
Have you ever met a person who seems to be on a perpetual caffeine high, without all the shaking? You know the type, those few hyperactive extroverts who are always doing things or meeting people, who have an expansive and optimistic mood yet are easily irritated, and who have an overactive libido or who enjoy really risky pastimes, like jumping out of airplanes or climbing buildings. According to some reading I've been doing, these are apparently…
amillikan | December 11, 2008A group of psychologists, ethicists and neuroscientists have added their voices to the growing debate over the merits and demerits of brain droping, the use of cognitive enhancement drugs like Adderall or Ritalin to improve mental performance. Their commentary, published online Sunday in Nature, argues that any adult in full mental health should be able to use the drugs at will. "Given the many cognitive-enhancing tools we accept already, from writing to laptop computers," they ask, "why draw the line here and say, thus far but no further?"
omnibrain | December 10, 2008In the never ending quest for death gadgets Mercedes has come up with a specialized screen that will show the driver one thing and the passenger another. Just think, now in addition to a driver watching a movie while they are going 70 mph they will be leaning all the way over into the passenger seat to see it. Unfortunately Mercedes hasn't created a system to keep stupid drivers from doing stupid things... like driving off a cliff while following the GPS directions on the screen they're allowed to see. Ok.. I jest - this seems like a pretty damn cool system and I totally want one. I'm…
grrlscientist | December 9, 2008tags: encephalon, brain, behavior, cognition, neurobiology, neuroscience, blog carnival
The last frontier: The brain.
Image: Orphaned. Contact me so I can provide credit and linkage.
Welcome to Encephalon! This is the blogosphere's neuroscience blog carnival that focuses specifically upon the brain, neuroscience, perception and behavior. If you sent me an essay or video about the brain and its relationship to behavior, perception, cognition, or learning, then it is included here! Also, please accept my sincerest apologies for the one day delay in publishing Encephalon: a police action in…
clock | December 9, 2008Tina writes - Kinesthetic Learners: Why Old Media Should Never Die:
.....Many classrooms, however, don't offer this type of kinesthetic learning. The hands-on learner is left to fend for themselves and more often than not the only physical interaction they get is with the learning material itself.
You've seen them before. Sometimes, it's a student whose fingers trace the words as they read them. Or the highlighter: the student who makes a colored mosaic of their text as they try to physically interact with the material. Even note-taking is a kinesthetic activity. In a variety of subtle ways,…
razib | December 8, 2008The absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs:
One crucial element for the evolution of cooperation may be the sensitivity to others' efforts and payoffs compared with one's own costs and gains. Inequity aversion is thought to be the driving force behind unselfish motivated punishment in humans constituting a powerful device for the enforcement of cooperation. Recent research indicates that non-human primates refuse to participate in cooperative problem-solving tasks if they witness a conspecific obtaining a more attractive reward for the same effort. However, little is known about…
amillikan | December 7, 2008The subject of one of the most famous case studies in cognitive psychology died Tuesday of heart failure. Referenced by the initials "H.M.," Henry Molaison was known for losing his episodic memory as the result of an operation during which neurosurgeons removed parts of his medial and temporal lobes in attempt to curb his epilepsy. "H.M. is the basis for nearly everything we now know today about the neural basis of memory," said ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts from Of Two Minds.
omnibrain | December 7, 2008 Oh pareidolia. I mean I understand seeing something that maybe looks like something else in the clouds or one time I accidentally peeled an orange that looked like a penis. But thinking that there is something actually significant and spiritually meaningful in seeing a pattern in randomness is ridiculous. This is my favorite example so far. It was only a matter of time until someone saw something like Jesus or in this case the Virgin Mary in an MRI scan. After all the Hippocampus is named after the sea horse since it vaguely looks like one.
Anyway here's the image - and if you want you…
omnibrain | December 4, 2008 A sports magazine writer asked me about the different techniques one could use to distract an athlete... here's what I said:
About a year ago another graduate student and I were planning on doing some research in my lab to determine what the best way of distracting a free throw shooter was. We have a pretty cool motion tracking system that would allow us to track arm and ball position as well as project distractions onto a wall - either real world video or computer generated distractions. But this is as far as we got since I saw some other research with a similar goal that didn't seem to be…
edyong | December 4, 2008Is punishment a destructive force that breaks societies or part of the very glue that holds them together? Last year, I blogged about two studies that tried to answer this question using similar psychological games. In both, volunteers played with tokens that were eventually exchanged for money. They had the option to either cooperate with each other so that the group as a whole reaped the greatest benefits, or cheat and freeload off the efforts of their peers.
In both studies, giving the players the option to punish each other soon put a relative end to cheating. Faced with the threat of…