Group items tagged

"The research, reported online in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology, could lead to new tools for diagnosis and treatment, and perhaps have applications in law enforcement. "Our paper is the first to show that you can use automated tools to detect the distinct speech patterns of psychopaths," says Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Cornell University. This can be valuable to clinical psychologists, because the approach to treatment of psychopaths can be very different. Straight from the Source Read the original study DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02025.x Researchers compared stories told by 14 imprisoned psychopathic male murderers with those of 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail; the stories were taped, transcribed, and subjected to computer analysis. A psychopath, as described by psychologists, is emotionally flat, lacks empathy for the feelings of others, and is free of remorse. Psychopaths behave as if the world is to be used for their benefit, and they employ deception and feigned emotion to manipulate others. The words of the experimental subjects matched these descriptions. Psychopaths used more conjunctions like "because," "since" or "so that," implying that the crime "had to be done" to obtain a particular goal. They used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food, sex, or money, while non-psychopaths used more words about social needs, including family, religion, and spirituality. Psychopaths are predators and their stories often include details of what they had to eat on the day of their crime, writes co-author Michael Woodworth, associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Psychopaths were more likely to use the past tense, suggesting a detachment from their crimes-and tended to be less fluent in their speech, using more "ums" and "uhs." Researchers speculate that the

"Scientists say they have found a way to activate the brain cells that trigger particular memories, according to research published today in the journal Science. Researchers at MIT employed optogenetics, a branch of science that uses light to stimulate molecules, to show that memories reside in specific brain cells, and that activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can revive the entire memory. The study was performed on mice, but the researchers say it is a powerful demonstration that memories are tangible and are physically stored in a particular part of the brain. "We demonstrate that behaviour based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light," said Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study. In the early 1900s, the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found that when he electrically stimulated certain neurons in the hippocampus area of the brain, his patients vividly recalled whole events. Until now, however, scientists have been unable to prove that the direct reactivation of the hippocampus was enough to cause memory recall."

"A few months ago, a construction worker named Wesley Autrey leapt in front of a moving subway train in New York City to save a stranger who had just collapsed onto the tracks. Five days later, the New York Times speculated that this act of apparent altruism-"I just saw someone who needed help," Autrey said-might be explained by a bunch of cells thought to exist in the human brain, called mirror neurons. The idea that these particular cells might underlie a fundamental human impulse reflects the emergence of a new scientific myth. Like a traditional myth, it captures intuitions about the human condition through vivid metaphors. This isn't the first time that popular science has merged with the popular imagination. In the 1960s, for example, pioneering work on "split-brain" patients revealed real functional differences between the two cerebral hemispheres-an idea that quickly became a metaphor for ancient intuitions about reason and passion. Advertisement Mirror neurons have become the "left brain/right brain" of the 21st century. The idea that these cells could make a hero out of Wesley Autrey began with a genuine and important discovery about the brains of macaque monkeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists found a population of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act but also when it watched another animal act. They called these cells "mirror neurons." It didn't take long for scientists and science writers to speculate that mirror neurons might serve as the physiological basis for a wide range of social behaviors, from altruism to art appreciation. Headlines like "Cells That Read Minds" or "How Brain's 'Mirrors' Aid Our Social Understanding" tapped into our intuitions about connectedness. Maybe this cell, with its mellifluous name, gives us our special capacity to understand one another-to care, to learn, and to communicate. Could mirror neurons be responsible for human language, culture, empathy, and morality? "

"Case histories make contributions to science and practice, but they can also be highly misleading. We illustrate with our re-examination of the case of Jane Doe; she was videotaped twice, once when she was six years old and then eleven years later when she was seventeen. During the first interview she reported sexual abuse by her mother. During the second interview she apparently forgot and then remembered the sexual abuse. Jane's case has been hailed by some as the new proof of recovery of repressed or dissociated traumatic memories, and even as proof of the reliability of recovered memories of repeated abuse. Numerous pieces of "supporting evidence" were given in the original article for believing that the abuse occurred. Upon closer scrutiny, however, there are reasons to doubt not only the "supporting evidence," but also that the sexual abuse ever happened in the first place. Our analysis raises several general questions about the use of case histories in science, medicine, and mental health. There is a cautionary tale not only for those professionals who advance the case history, but also for those who base their theories on it or would readily accept it as proof."

"As neurologists, psychologists and biologists have zeroed in more and more precisely on the physical causes of mental disorders, they have found themselves addressing a much deeper mystery, a set of interrelated conundrums probably as old as humanity: What, precisely, is the mind, the elusive entity where intelligence, decision making, perception, awareness and sense of self reside? Where is it located? How does it work? Does it arise from purely physical processes-pulses of electricity zapping from brain cell to brain cell, helped along their way by myriad complex chemicals? Or is it something beyond the merely physical-something ethereal that might be close to the spiritual concept of the soul? Great thinkers have had no shortage of ideas on the subject. Plato was convinced that the mind must be located inside the head, because the head is shaped more or less like a sphere, his idea of the highest geometrical form. Aristotle insisted that the mind was in the heart. His reasoning: warmth implies vitality; the blood is warm; the heart pumps the blood. By the Middle Ages, though, pretty much everyone agreed that the mind arose from the brain -- but still had no clear idea how it arose. Finally, in the 17th century, the French philosopher Rena Descartes declared that the mind, while it might live in the brain, was a nonmaterial thing, entirely separate from the physical tissues found inside the head. Furthermore, said Descartes in one of history's most memorable sound bites, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). His point: consciousness is the only sure evidence that we actually exist. Until just a few years ago, unraveling the relationship of mind and brain was beyond the realm of observation and experimentation. But science has finally begun to catch up with philosophy. Using sensitive electrodes inserted deep into the gray matter of test animals, researchers have watched vision as it percolates inward from the eye's retina to the inner brain. Powerful te

"For a hormone, oxytocin is pretty famous. It's the "cuddle chemical" -- the hormone that helps mothers bond with their babies. Salespeople can buy oxytocin spray on the internet, to make their clients trust them. It's known for promoting positive feelings, but more recent research has found that oxytocin can promote negative emotions, too. The authors of a new review article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, takes a look at what oxytocin is really doing."

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer "language confusion," which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish - or Mandarin - for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren't many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child. But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior - where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention - to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies' brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain. Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their

"Humans are storytelling machines. We don't passively perceive the world - we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life. But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We're so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales - the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue - actually happened to my little sister. I'd stolen her trauma. The reason we're such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures. The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner. This time, though, the subjects were given a "lifeline": they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing g

Samuel Beckett, born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906, was a native English speaker. However, in 1946 Beckett decided that he would begin writing exclusively in French. After composing the first draft in his second language, he would then translate these words back into English. This difficult constraint - forcing himself to consciously unpack his own sentences - led to a burst of genius, as many of Beckett's most famous works (Malloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, etc.) were written during this period. When asked why he wrote first in French, Beckett said it made it easier for him to "write without style." Beckett would later expand on these comments, noting that his use of French prevented him from slipping into his usual writerly habits, those crutches of style that snuck into his English prose. Instead of relying on the first word that leapt into consciousness - that most automatic of associations - he was forced by his second language to reflect on what he actually wanted to express. His diction became more intentional. There's now some neat experimental proof of this Beckettian strategy. In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, a team of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago found that forcing people to rely on a second language systematically reduced human biases, allowing the subjects to escape from the usual blind spots of cognition. In a sense, they were better able to think without style. The paper is a tour de force of cross-cultural comparison, as the scientists conducted six experiments on three continents (n > 600) in five different languages: English, Korean, French, Spanish and Japanese. Although all subjects were proficient in their second language, they were not "balanced bilingual." The experiments themselves relied on classic paradigms borrowed from prospect theory, in which people are asked to make decisions under varying conditions of uncertainty and risk. For instance, native English

"Talking about ourselves-whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter-triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money, researchers reported Monday. About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts. Bragging gives the same sensation of pleasure as food and money. The same areas of the brain are activated, scans show. "Self-disclosure is extra rewarding," said Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves," Ms. Tamir said. To assess people's inclination for what the researchers call "self disclosure," they conducted laboratory tests to see whether people placed an unusually high value on the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings. They also monitored brain activity among some volunteers to see what parts of the brain were most excited when people talked about themselves as opposed to other people. The dozens of volunteers were mostly Americans who lived near the university. In several tests, they offered the volunteers money if they chose to answer questions about other people, such as President Obama, rather than about themselves, paying out on a sliding scale of up to four cents. Questions involved casual matters such as whether someone enjoyed snowboarding or liked mushrooms on a pizza. Other queries involved personality traits, such as intelligence, curiosity or aggression."

"Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it. The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence. Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories). The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them. "This is what I would call a foundational finding," said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. "I cannot think of any recent study that's comparable. "

"Modern art is an explosion of colors, smooth lines, flat portraits - and it turns out, neuroscience. It also once triggered some strong psychology. A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public," the criticCamille Mauclair, said in outrage over a Paris showing of the artist Henri Matisse's vibrant works. His condemnation today seems more colorful than the paintings themselves, many now hanging in museums all over the world. What was really going on at the turn of the last century to excite such controversy? Brain researchers have increasingly turned their eyes on artists, in an effort to enrich our understanding of how we see art and of the time when paintings could shake society. "When we look at a picture and feel rewarded, we know something is occurring in our brain," says neuroscientist and artist Bevil Conway of Wellesley (Mass.) College. Conway and other neuroscientists, such as Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, author of the just-released The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, represent the latest voices among brain researchers taking a look at art. "By closely examining artists' paintings and practices, we can discover hints to how the brain works, and achieve insight into the discoveries and inventions of artists and their impact on culture," Conway writes in the current Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, looking at color in the paintings of Matisse , Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet . Public domain Montross Gallery 1915 exhibition catalogue image of 'Gold Fish' by Henri Matisse. Color depends on more than the wavelength of light reaching your eye. Five decades ago, brain researchers thought only the cone-shaped "photoreceptor" cells in the retina determined what colors we see. But we now know that starting from the retina and proceeding through at least five brain regions, our perception of color is shaped not so much by the redness of the paint used to hang an apple from a tree, but

"Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the "ground truth" - to replicate the original in every respect. "We remove the room," he said, "so the ground truth can be delivered." Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors. But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. "It's about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound," Dr. Kyriakakis said. Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. "Psychoacoustics is fundamental," said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. "You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works - how sound relates to human perception." "

"Scientists who scanned the brains of men convicted of murder, rape and violent assaults have found the strongest evidence yet that psychopaths have structural abnormalities in their brains. The researchers, based at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, said the differences in psychopaths' brains mark them out even from other violent criminals with anti-social personality disorders (ASPD), and from healthy non-offenders. Nigel Blackwood, who led the study, said the ability to use brain scans to identify and diagnose this sub-group of violent criminals has important implications for treatment. The study showed that psychopaths , who are characterised by a lack of empathy, had less grey matter in the areas of the brain important for understanding other peoples' emotions. While cognitive and behavourial treatments may benefit people with anti-social personality disorders, the same approach may not work for psychopaths with brain damage, Blackwood said. "To get a clear idea of which treatments are working, you've got to clearly define what people are like going into the treatment programmes," he said in a telephone interview. Essi Viding a professor in the psychology and language sciences department of University College London, who was not involved in Blackwood's study, said it provided "weighty new evidence" about the importance of distinguishing psychopathic from non-psychopathic people rather than grouping them together. The findings also have implications for the justice system, because linking psychopathy to brain function raises the prospect of arguing a defence of insanity. Interest in what goes on inside the heads of violent criminals has been sharpened by the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who massacred 77 people last July. Two court-appointed psychiatric teams who examined Breivik came to opposite conclusions about his mental health. The killer himself has railed being called insane."

"MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory. As you can imagine, the trick here is activating individual neurons, which are incredibly small and not really the kind of thing you can attach electrodes to. To do this, the researchers used optogenetics, a bleeding edge sphere of science that involves the genetic manipulation of cells so that they're sensitive to light. These modified cells are then triggered using lasers; you drill a hole through the subject's skull and point the laser at a small cluster of neurons. Now, just to temper your excitement, we should note that MIT's subjects in this case are mice - but it's very, very likely that the human brain functions in the same way. To perform this experiment, though, MIT had to breed genetically engineered mice with optogenetic neurons - and we're a long, long way off breeding humans with optogenetic brains. In the experiment, MIT gave mice an electric shock to create a fear memory in the hippocampus region of the brain (pictured above) - and then later, using laser light, activated the neurons where the memory was stored. The mice "quickly entered a defensive, immobile crouch," strongly suggesting the fear memory was being recalled."

"ACCORDING to Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, most undergraduates are WEIRD. Those who teach them might well agree. But Dr Henrich did not intend the term as an insult when he popularised it in a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2010. Instead, he was proposing an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. One reason these things matter is that undergraduates are also psychology's laboratory rats. Incentivised by rewards, in the form of money or course credits, they will do the human equivalents of running mazes and pressing the levers in Skinner boxes until the cows come home. Which is both a blessing and a problem. It is a blessing because it provides psychologists with an endless supply of willing subjects. And it is a problem because those subjects are WEIRD, and thus not representative of humanity as a whole. Indeed, as Dr Henrich found from his analysis of leading psychology journals, a random American undergraduate is about 4,000 times more likely than an average human being to be the subject of such a study. Drawing general conclusions about the behaviour of Homo sapiens from the results of these studies is risky. This state of affairs, though, may be coming to an end. The main reasons undergraduates have been favoured in the past are that they are cheap, and easy for academics to recruit. But a new source of supply is now emerging: crowdsourcing."

"A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis of long-term effects of violent video game play on the brain has found changes in brain regions associated with cognitive function and emotional control in young adult men after one week of game play. The results of the study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The controversy over whether or not violent video games are potentially harmful to users has raged for many years, making it as far as the Supreme Court in 2010. But there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative neurological effect. "For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home," said Yang Wang, M.D., assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. "These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior." For the study, 22 healthy adult males, age 18 to 29, with low past exposure to violent video games were randomly assigned to two groups of 11. Members of the first group were instructed to play a shooting video game for 10 hours at home for one week and refrain from playing the following week. The second group did not play a violent video game at all during the two-week period. Each of the 22 men underwent fMRI at the beginning of the study, with follow-up exams at one and two weeks. During fMRI, the participants completed an emotional interference task, pressing buttons according to the color of visually presented words. Words indicating violent actions were interspersed among nonviolent action words. In addition, the participants completed a cognitive inhibition counting task. The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members s

"A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. The scandal, involving about a decade of work, is the latest in a string of embarrassments in a field that critics and statisticians say badly needs to overhaul how it treats research results. In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. "The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found," said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It's almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well." "

"Henri Tajfel's interest in identity and group prejudice was sparked by his own experiences as a Polish Jew during the Second World War. As Professor of Social Psychology at Bristol university he developed a series of experiments known as the Minimal Group Studies, the purpose of which was to establish the minimum basis on which people could be made to identify with their own group and show bias against another. Claudia Hammond re-visits the Minimal Group Studies of 1971, where Tajfel and his collaborators got boys at a comprehensive school to view abstract paintings and then assigned them to the 'Klee' group or the 'Kandinsky' group, apparently because of the preferences they declared, but in fact entirely at random. Even though the boys didn't know who else was allocated to their group, they consistently awarded more points to their own group than to the other. So even though who belonged to which group was meaningless, they always tended to favour their own. This proved to be the first step towards Social Identity Theory, as developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, which stressed that our identification with groups varies according to how significant that group is at the time: if we're at war our national identity is important, at a football match it's our team identity that's to the fore... Tajfel died in 1982, but his legacy can be seen in the work many of his former students continue in the same field. Claudia Hammond hears from four of them, including Michael Billig - Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, who helped run the 1971 studies, Miles Hewstone, Rupert Brown and Steve Reicher, Professors of Social Psychology at Oxford, Sussex and St Andrews respectively."

"Science all but confirms that humans are hard-wired to respond to music. Studies also suggest that someday music may even help patients heal from Parkinson's disease or a stroke. In The Power of Music, Elena Mannes explores how music affects different groups of people and how it could play a role in health care. Mannes tracked the human relationship with music over the course of a life span. She tells NPR's Neal Conan that studies show that infants prefer "consonant intervals, the smooth-sounding ones that sound nice to our Western ears in a chord, as opposed to a jarring combination of notes." In fact, Mannes says the cries of babies just a few weeks old were found to contain some of the basic intervals common to Western music. She also says scientists have found that music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other human function. That's why she sees so much potential in music's power to change the brain and affect the way it works. Mannes says music also has the potential to help people with neurological deficits. "A stroke patient who has lost verbal function - those verbal functions may be stimulated by music," she says. One technique, known as melodic intonation therapy, uses music to coax portions of the brain into taking over for those that are damaged. In some cases, it can help patients regain their ability to speak. And because of how we associate music with memories, Mannes says such techniques could also be helpful for Alzheimer's patients. Less recently, archaeologists have discovered ancient flutes - one of which is presumed to be the oldest musical instrument in the world - that play a scale similar to the modern Western scale. "And remarkably," Mannes says, "this flute, when played, produces these amazingly pure tones." It's a significant discovery because it adds to the argument that musical ability and interest were present early in human history."