Psychology
edyong | August 27, 2008 Yesterday, I wrote about selfless capuchin monkeys, who find personal reward in the act of giving other monkeys. The results seemed to demonstrate that monkeys are sensitive to the welfare of their peers, and will make choices that benefit others without any material gain for themselves. Today, another study looks at the same processes in a very different sort of cheeky monkey - human children.
Humans are notable among other animals for our vast capacity for cooperation and empathy. Our concern about the experiences of other people, and our natural aversion to unfair play are the bedrocks…
omnibrain | August 26, 2008A classic Candid Camera prank using some social psychology.
I'll be posting many more of my Psych 100 videos as I run across them for the rest of the semester :)
edyong | August 22, 2008
On 14 January 2005, Lawrence Summers (right), president of Harvard University spoke of the reasons behind the disproportionate lack of women in top-end science and engineering jobs. Avoiding suggestions of discrimination, he offered two explanations - unwillingness to commit to the 80-hour weeks needed for top level positions and, more controversially, a lower "intrinsic aptitude" for the fields. According to Summers, research showed that genetic differences between the sexes led to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end".
For years, scientists have battled over the…
edyong | August 19, 2008When you look at someone's face, what part do you concentrate on? Common wisdom has it that the eyes are the focal point of the face and they are the features that draw attention first. But according to a new study, that may not be universally true - while Western cultures do fixate on the eyes, East Asians tend to focus on the nose.
We owe a lot of our knowledge about the way we look at images to a Russian psychologist Alfred Yarbus. He was the first scientist to carefully record the subtle eye movements that people make when they take in a view. Yarbus's experiments showed that our gaze…
grrlscientist | August 19, 2008tags: Who Blogs, blog writing and personality, Big Five personality inventory, social psychology, technology, computers, internet, researchblogging.org
You all read blogs, and many of you write them, too. But what sort of person writes a blog? Are there particular personality traits that make certain people more likely to write a blog? If so, what are those personality traits? Do you have them, too?
A team of scientists, led by psychologist Rosanna Guadagno from the University of Alabama, wondered what personality traits made some people more likely than others to write blogs. To answer…
edyong | August 19, 2008Strip away the trendy clothes, the shiny ornaments and the cosmetically enhanced body parts and consider the naked human body. Free of decorations and distractions, what makes one body more attractive than another? According to one group of scientists, symmetry is part of the answer. William Brown and colleagues at Brunel University found that both men and women fancied symmetrical bodies over asymmetrical ones.
Many animals naturally develop asymmetric body parts; just look at the massive claw of the fiddler crab or the distorted Picasso-like face of the flatfish. But most mismatches…
clock | August 18, 2008That is an interesting question, an answer to which was attempted in this paper:
Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging:
The Big Five personality inventory measures personality based on five key traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness [Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Normal personality assessment in clinical practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment 4, 5-13]. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that individual differences on the Big Five factors are associated with different types…
omnibrain | August 18, 2008 Thanks to a reader, Daniel Keogh, we have a wonderful video detailing what the Imperial March from Star Wars would taste like to one particular synaesthete who has some particularly odd sensation pairings.
Check it out:
The Professor Funk also has a whole bunch of other entertaining looking videos about other aspects of science. We give them 4 thumbs up. I never did understand why Ebert, et. al. could only ever give a single thumbs up. After all there were two people with four total thumbs. Meh whatever, not everyone can be as awesome as Shelley and I.
purepedantry | August 18, 2008There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific terms the techniques that magicians use to trick their audiences. The authors break down these into "visual illusions (after-images), optical illusions ('smoke and mirrors'), cognitive illusions (inattentional blindness), special effects (explosions, fake gunshots, et cetera), and secret devices and mechanical artifacts (…
clock | August 15, 2008From The National Humanities Center:
The National Humanities Center will host the third and final conference on "The Human & The Humanities," November 13 - 15, 2008, once again attracting scientists and humanities scholars to discuss how developments in science are challenging traditional notions of "the human." Events will begin on the evening of November 13 with a lecture from noted neurologist and author Oliver Sacks at the William and Ida Friday Center in Chapel Hill, NC.
This event is free, but guests must register in advance to guarantee seating.
Other speakers and special guests…
omnibrain | August 13, 2008So... my girlfriend studies categories and concepts and her adviser wanted her to show a video for her first year project. Of course I went out to youtube and tried to find something sensible since I'm procrastinating right now on my psych 100 syllabus - and of course I found something absolutely ridiculous (hey... it IS youtube). Here is how to categorize all the Alien Species that have been wandering around the earth since our first contact with our galactic overlords at Roswell:
edyong | August 13, 2008Tune into the Olympic coverage over the next few weeks, and you will see many an athlete proudly raise their arms and head in victory, while a much larger number slump their shoulders and necks in defeat. We've all shown the same body language ourselves, and a new study reveals why - they are innate and universal behaviours, performed by humans all over the world in response to success and failure.
The discovery comes from Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia and David Matsumoto from San Francisco State University, who wanted to see how people across different cultures…
edyong | August 8, 2008
Social lives are delicate things. We've all had situations where friendships and relationships have been dented and broken, and we're reasonably skilled at repairing the damage. This ability to keep our social ties from snapping relies on being able to read other people, and on knowing a thing or two about what's normal in human society.
For instance, we appreciate that cheating fosters ill-will, while generosity can engender trust. So cheaters might try to win back their companions with giving gestures. These little exchanges are the glue that bind groups of people into happy and…
clock | August 7, 2008...but if you do, I hope it was enjoyable! And edifying, of course. Kind of science that is amenable to experimentation at home.
purepedantry | July 31, 2008Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week.
Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required to test children for a variety of skills on a yearly basis. The paper looked at math performance across grade-level broken down by gender for 10 states from these tests.
Here is the key graph:
The data includes a measure of effect size called Cohen's d (I discussed it here) and a measure called the variance ratio (VR -- which is…
clock | July 28, 2008Science Communicators of North Carolina:
Thursday, August 7
7 p.m.
The Beautiful Mind: Making Memories
Dr. Kelly Giovanello of the UNC-CH Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab. Part of the Morehead Planetarium Current Science Forum.
250 E. Franklin St., Chapel Hill, (919) 962-1236
clock | July 19, 2008Carl Zimmer: How Your Brain Can Control Time:
For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When the brain needed to time some event, a gate opened and the pulses moved into some kind of counting device.
One reason this clock model was so compelling: Psychologists could use it to explain how our perception of time changes. Think about how your feeling of time slows down as you see a car crash on the road ahead, how it speeds up when you're wheeling around a…
aardvarchaeology | July 19, 2008A much-publicised trial in Falun, Sweden is giving me a funny feeling. The man on the stand has confessed to the murder of a woman and a small girl, and is also charged with the violent rape of both and of a second woman. The case makes me feel queasy in more ways than one.
Anybody half sane will of course feel incomprehending revulsion when faced with the fact of men with the drive to beat, rape and murder. But there's something more to it for me. And I think I know what it is. This insane sadistic sex murderer was just following his strongest urges. And so have I done for all my adult life…
edyong | July 15, 2008Which of these strings of letters is easier to remember: QKJITJGPI or BBCITVCNN?
Chances are, you chose the latter string, where the nine letters are the combined names of three television networks. This neatly illustrates a fundamental property of human memory - that we remember long strings of information more easily if we can break them down into bite-sized chunks. In this case, a nine-letter string can be divided into three lots of three letters. You probably use similar strategies for remembering telephone numbers, credit card details, or post codes.
Now, Lisa Feigenson and Justin…
neurophilosophy | July 14, 2008As I mentioned last month, the British Psychological Society (BPS) recently commissioned a report into the implications of memory research for the legal profession.
The report, written by the Memory and Law Working Party, a research board established by the BPS and chaired by cognitive psychologist Martin Conway of the University of Leeds, has now been published.
The BPS has just issued a set of recommendations based on the report. These guidelines, which are available as a PDF, are intended to inform those who work in criminal and civil law - for example, the police as they try to extract…