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anonymous

Dr. Michael Lewis - Eyewitness Identification Test - 0 views

www.ipsychexpts.com/...introduction-ext.html

psychology eyewitness Dr. Michael Lewis test sense perception

shared by anonymous on 18 May 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 18 May 11
     
    "This study investigates eyewitness identification.You will be asked to study a face and to pick it out of a line up later. You will also be asked to answer a number of general knowledge questions and to reflect on how confident you are of your answers. This study is being conducted by Dr Michael Lewis from Cardiff University who can be contacted via the following email address: lewismb@cardiff.ac.uk. This study will take approximately 5 minutes to complete. Participation in this study will not involve any known risks and data gathered in the study will be confidential and for research purposes only. Note, however that there is a negligible possibility that your responses could be viewed by unauthorized third parties. You are free to withdraw from the study at any time without penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. If you are 18 or over, understand the statement above and freely consent to participate in this study then click on the "I Agree" button to begin the study."
anonymous

Behavioral Genetics--A second look at twin studies - 0 views

www.apa.org/...second.aspx

genetics twin studies Galton behavior

shared by anonymous on 18 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 18 May 11
     
    As behavioral genetics enters a second century, the field's oldest research method remains both relevant and controversial. "Twins have a special claim upon our attention; it is, that their history affords means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and those that were imposed by the special circumstances of their after lives." -- Sir Francis Galton, 19th century behavioral genetics pioneer, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development,1875 More than a century after Galton's observation, twin studies remain a favorite tool of behavioral geneticists. Researchers have used twin studies to try to disentangle the environmental and genetic backgrounds of a cornucopia of traits, from aggression to intelligence to schizophrenia to alcohol dependence. But despite the popularity of twin studies, some psychologists have long questioned assumptions that underlie them--like the supposition that fraternal and identical twins share equal environments or that people choose mates with traits unlike their own. The equal environments assumption, for example, has been debated for at least 40 years. Many researchers have found evidence that the assumption is valid, but others remain skeptical (see Further Reading below). Overall, twin studies assumptions remain controversial, says psychologist James Jaccard, PhD, a psychologist who studies statistical methods at the University at Albany of the State University of New York. In response, though, researchers are working to expand and develop twin study designs and statistical methods. And while the assumptions question remains a stumbling block for some researchers, many agree twin studies will continue to be an important tool--along with emerging genome and molecular research methods (see article page 42)--in shedding light on human behavioral genetics."
anonymous

Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them - 0 views

www.wired.com/...mind_decision

Psychology biological neuroscience fMRI brain scan brain imaging free will

shared by anonymous on 05 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 05 Jan 12
     
    "You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it. In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them. The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion? "Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist. Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has. In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine. Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis
anonymous

Understanding the Anxious Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...04anxiety-t.html

Psychology BLOA Kagan temperment

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 12
     
    "Jerome Kagan's "Aha!" moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive. Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Related Letters: The Anxious Mind (October 18, 2009) Health Guide: Anxiety Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (191) » No high-reactors among the first 18. They gazed calmly at things that were unfamiliar. But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty - new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells - and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new. Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament. This past summer, Kagan showed me a video of her from 2004, when she was 15. We sat in a screening room in Harvard's William James Hall - a building named, coincidentally, for the 19th-century psychologist who described his own struggles with anxiety as "a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach ... a sense of the insecurity of life." Kagan is elfin and spry, ba
anonymous

Jeff Wise: How Panic Doomed Air France Flight 447 - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...doomed-an-airli_b_1135004.html

Psychology brain amygdala flight emotion frontal cortex airplane

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Air France 447 was operating with three pilots: a captain, who was the most senior crewmember, and two co-pilots. At any given time, two of them were required to be in the cockpit, seated at the pair of seats equipped with controls. Four hours into the flight, the captain went to take a nap, leaving the flying of the plane to the more junior of the co-pilots, Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Sitting beside him was the other co-pilot, David Robert. The crisis began mere minutes later, when the plane flew into clouds roiling up from a large tropical thunderstorm, and the moisture condensed and froze on the plane's external air-speed sensors. In response, the autopilot disengaged. For a few minutes, the pilots had no way of knowing how fast they were going, and had to fly the plane by hand -- something, crucially, that Bonin had no experience doing at that altitude. The proper thing for Bonin to have done would have been to keep the plane flying level and to have Robert refer to a relevant checklist to sort out their airspeed problems. Instead, neither man consulted a checklist and Bonin pulled back on the controls, causing the airplane to climb and lose airspeed. Soon, he had put the plane into an aerodynamic stall, which means that the wings had lost their ability to generate lift. Even with engines at full power, the Airbus began to plummet toward the ocean. As the severity of their predicament became more and more apparent, the pilots were unable to reason through the cause of their situation. Despite numerous boldfaced clues to the nature of their problem -- including a stall-warning alarm that blared 75 times -- they were simply baffled. As Robert put it, after the captain had hurried back to the cockpit, "We've totally lost control of the plane. We don't understand at all... We've tried everything." Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour. In the case of Air France 447, it appears that Bonin, in his panic, completely forgot one of the most basic tenets of flight training: when at risk of a stall, never pull back on the controls. Instead, he held back the controls in a kind of panicked death-grip all the way down to the ocean. Ironically, if he had simply taken his hands away, the plane would have regained speed and started flying again.
  • Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.
  • Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.
  • Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.
  • Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.
  • Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.
  • anonymous on 10 Dec 11
     
    Air France 447 was operating with three pilots: a captain, who was the most senior crewmember, and two co-pilots. At any given time, two of them were required to be in the cockpit, seated at the pair of seats equipped with controls. Four hours into the flight, the captain went to take a nap, leaving the flying of the plane to the more junior of the co-pilots, Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Sitting beside him was the other co-pilot, David Robert. The crisis began mere minutes later, when the plane flew into clouds roiling up from a large tropical thunderstorm, and the moisture condensed and froze on the plane's external air-speed sensors. In response, the autopilot disengaged. For a few minutes, the pilots had no way of knowing how fast they were going, and had to fly the plane by hand -- something, crucially, that Bonin had no experience doing at that altitude. The proper thing for Bonin to have done would have been to keep the plane flying level and to have Robert refer to a relevant checklist to sort out their airspeed problems. Instead, neither man consulted a checklist and Bonin pulled back on the controls, causing the airplane to climb and lose airspeed. Soon, he had put the plane into an aerodynamic stall, which means that the wings had lost their ability to generate lift. Even with engines at full power, the Airbus began to plummet toward the ocean. As the severity of their predicament became more and more apparent, the pilots were unable to reason through the cause of their situation. Despite numerous boldfaced clues to the nature of their problem -- including a stall-warning alarm that blared 75 times -- they were simply baffled. As Robert put it, after the captain had hurried back to the cockpit, "We've totally lost control of the plane. We don't understand at all... We've tried everything." Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the
anonymous

Comment: TV is not bad for children | Media | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...comment.broadcasting

cognitive Social Learning Theory Bandura St. Helena violence children

shared by anonymous on 01 May 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 01 May 12
     
    "Well, almost official, as results of a unique study show that people not programmes affect behaviour. Television is bad for us. It corrodes the moral fabric of society and corrupts our children with relentless images of violence. Well, that's what the proponents of increased television regulation - politicians, social campaigners and certain elements of the media- would like us to believe. Yet events on one of the world's most remote inhabited islands tell a different and fascinating story, one which is less palatable to those who seek an convenient scapegoat for the ills of modern society. Five years ago, television arrived on St Helena, in the South Atlantic. Previously, the inhabitants of this isolated British sovereignty, to which Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled, had no access to broadcast television. Amid the excitement of its arrival, there was concern that exposure to television would have a detrimental impact on the island's children, previously shown to be among the best behaved in the world. This event provided researchers with a rare opportunity to examine the effects of television in a real-life setting both before and after its arrival. Previous research had mostly relied on studies in artificial laboratory conditions. Findings have been contradictory, with some studies providing conclusive evidence of links between television viewing and antisocial behaviour, others claiming beneficial effects and some denying any links at all. What all these studies had in common was that they lacked real life. The opportunity to gather pre- and post-TV-watching data using a whole population (rather than samples) of children was gratefully seized by myself and colleagues; here was a real chance toput television on trial. "
anonymous

Why Antidepressants Are No Better Than Placebos - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ews-about-antidepressants.html

research antidepressants placebo Kirsch

shared by anonymous on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 14 Aug 11
     
    "Although the year is young, it has already brought my first moral dilemma. In early January a friend mentioned that his New Year's resolution was to beat his chronic depression once and for all. Over the years he had tried a medicine chest's worth of antidepressants, but none had really helped in any enduring way, and when the side effects became so unpleasant that he stopped taking them, the withdrawal symptoms (cramps, dizziness, headaches) were torture. Did I know of any research that might help him decide whether a new antidepressant his doctor recommended might finally lift his chronic darkness at noon? The moral dilemma was this: oh, yes, I knew of 20-plus years of research on antidepressants, from the old tricyclics to the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that target serotonin (Zoloft, Paxil, and the granddaddy of them all, Prozac, as well as their generic descendants) to even newer ones that also target norepinephrine (Effexor, Wellbutrin). The research had shown that antidepressants help about three quarters of people with depression who take them, a consistent finding that serves as the basis for the oft-repeated mantra "There is no question that the safety and efficacy of antidepressants rest on solid scientific evidence," as psychiatry professor Richard Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College recently wrote in The New York Times. But ever since a seminal study in 1998, whose findings were reinforced by landmark research in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month, that evidence has come with a big asterisk. Yes, the drugs are effective, in that they lift depression in most patients. But that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill-a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs. Hence the moral dilemma. The placebo ef
anonymous

Psychopaths Have Distinct Brain Structure, Study Finds - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...rain-structure-_n_1497753.html

Psychology psychopaths brain structure biological

shared by anonymous on 09 May 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 09 May 12
     
    "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."
anonymous

Testosterone Study Has Fathers Questioning Their Manhood - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...questioning-their-manhood.html

Psychology hormone testosterone study manhood fathers

shared by anonymous on 17 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Sep 11
     
    "SCIENCE confirmed last week what A. J. Jacobs had already feared. "I knew that my testosterone was at a low point when I found myself wearing my wife's polka-dotted breast-feeding pillow strapped around my waist in an attempt to feed a bottle of milk to my infant son," said Mr. Jacobs, a writer who lives in Manhattan with his wife and three young children. He and new fathers everywhere were calibrating the state of their manhood after the release of a much-discussed study of 600 men that indicated that testosterone - the defining hormone of maleness - drops after a man becomes a father. If that were not enough, the study seems to suggest that practice actually makes imperfect when it comes to the hours men spend in rearing children. It found that the more time a man spends each day, say, strapping Crocs onto his toddler's feet or helping her off the monkey bars, the more the hormone flags. In a Mr. Mom era, where society encourages (and family schedules often demand) that men enthusiastically embrace a 50-50 split of every parenting duty short of breast-feeding, the question on many fathers' minds is whether all of their efforts to be the ideal contemporary man are also making them less of one. "
anonymous

The Neuroscience of Your Brain On Fiction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html

Psychology brain fMRI emotion language meaning

shared by anonymous on 20 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 20 Mar 12
     
    "MID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the "classical" language regions, like Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like "lavender," "cinnamon" and "soap," for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for "perfume" and "coffee," their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean "chair" and "key," this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet vo
anonymous

The Benefits of Bilingualism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-benefits-of-bilingualism.html

Bilingualism language Psychology memory research brain cognitive

shared by anonymous on 23 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Mar 12
     
    "SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child's academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual's brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn't so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins - one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin m
anonymous

Violent video games alter brain function in young men | ScienceBlog.com - 1 views

scienceblog.com/...er-brain-function-in-young-men

Psychology brain cognitive fMRI violence video games

shared by anonymous on 30 Nov 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 30 Nov 11
     
    "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
anonymous

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Mind Changers, Henri Tajfel's Minimal Groups - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/b00yw6km

bbc Psychology research Tajfel group identity SLOA podcast

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 11
     
    "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."
anonymous

Futurity.org - Psychopaths' words expose predatory mind - 0 views

www.futurity.org/...hs-words-expose-predatory-mind

psychopaths Psychology biological brain language

shared by anonymous on 09 May 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 09 May 12
     
    "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
anonymous

Army Hospital Accused of Reversing PTSD Diagnoses to Cut Costs - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/costs-140018395--abc-news.html

abnormal ptsd hospital Psychology diagnosis

shared by anonymous on 23 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Mar 12
     
    "An army hospital in Tacoma, Wash. is under fire for reneging on mental health care for troops diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Since 2007, more than 300 soldiers under consideration for medical retirement because of PTSD had their diagnoses reversed by a screening team at Madigan Army Medical Center -- a move criticized for putting costs before care. "Over 40 percent of those service members who walked in the door with a PTSD diagnosis had their diagnosis changed to something else or overturned entirely," Sen. Patty Murray said at a Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing Wednesday. "In light of all the tragedies we have seen that stem from the untreated, invisible wounds of war, I'm sure that you would agree that this is very concerning." PTSD is an anxiety disorder brought on by a traumatic event. The symptoms -- from anger and hypervigilance to numbness and avoidance, not to mention recurrent nightmares and terrifying flashbacks -- can wreak havoc on a person's personal and professional life. A 2010 study by Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found up to 30 percent of Iraq war veterans have symptoms of PTSD. The diagnosis can cost taxpayers as much as $1.5 million per soldier, according to an Army Medical Command memo obtained by the Seattle Times. "The challenges of PTSD and mental health care are real. And no one -- no one -- should be denying any service member purely because of a question of cost," said Murray. "That is something the tax payers of this country bear the burden of providing. We will provide it." Madigan is currently under investigation by the U.S. Army Medical Command for the reversed diagnoses. But Murray argued the investigation should be military-wide. "I want to make sure that we are really looking not just at Madigan… but system-wide," she said, adding that cost should not stand in the way of soldiers getting "the care that they have earned and they deserve and that this country expects them to have." Army
anonymous

Experimental psychology: The roar of the crowd | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/21555876

Psychology crowd economist methodology crowd-sourcing

shared by anonymous on 25 May 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 25 May 12
     
    "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."
anonymous

Triggering a memory: scientists learn how to reboot recollections - 0 views

theconversation.edu.au/w-to-reboot-recollections-6013

memory reboot biological cognitive brain

shared by anonymous on 30 May 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 30 May 12
     
    "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."
anonymous

Twins - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...miller-text

twins genetics MISTRA Bouchard nature vs nurture epigenetics

shared by anonymous on 05 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 05 Jan 12
     
    "To these scientists, and to biomedical researchers all over the world, twins offer a precious opportunity to untangle the influence of genes and the environment-of nature and nurture. Because identical twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits in two, they share virtually the same genetic code. Any differences between them-one twin having younger looking skin, for example-must be due to environmental factors such as less time spent in the sun. Alternatively, by comparing the experiences of identical twins with those of fraternal twins, who come from separate eggs and share on average half their DNA, researchers can quantify the extent to which our genes affect our lives. If identical twins are more similar to each other with respect to an ailment than fraternal twins are, then vulnerability to the disease must be rooted at least in part in heredity. These two lines of research-studying the differences between identical twins to pinpoint the influence of environment, and comparing identical twins with fraternal ones to measure the role of inheritance-have been crucial to understanding the interplay of nature and nurture in determining our personalities, behavior, and vulnerability to disease. Lately, however, twin studies have helped lead scientists to a radical, almost heretical new conclusion: that nature and nurture are not the only elemental forces at work. According to a recent field called epigenetics, there is a third factor also in play, one that in some cases serves as a bridge between the environment and our genes, and in others operates on its own to shape who we are."
anonymous

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice | Racism, Bias & Politics | Right-Win... - 0 views

www.livescience.com/ocial-conservatism-racism.html

SLOA prejudice conservative IQ discrimination racist

shared by anonymous on 31 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 31 Jan 12
     
    "There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy. The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience. "Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said."
anonymous

For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05brain.html

brain nytimes memory cognition fMRI

shared by anonymous on 31 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 31 Jan 12
     
    "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. "
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