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New research in a Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin report shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning. sentences containing words that invoked taste activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting. Interestingly, the metaphorical and literal words only resulted in brain activity related to emotion when part of a sentence, but stimulated the gustatory cortices both in sentences and as stand-alone words. Metaphorical sentences may spark increased brain activity in emotion-related regions because they allude to physical experiences, said co-author Adele Goldberg, a Princeton professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities. Human language frequently uses physical sensations or objects to refer to abstract domains such as time, understanding or emotion, Goldberg said. "You begin to realize when you look at metaphors how common they are in helping us understand abstract domains," Goldberg said. "It could be that we are more engaged with abstract concepts when we use metaphorical language that ties into physical experiences."

New study co-authored by Lera Boroditsky: "The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments...we find that metaphors can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve complex problems and how they gather more information to make "well-informed" decisions."

"The current, long-standing theory suggests that children learn their first words through a series of associations; they associate words they hear with multiple possible referents in their immediate environment....A small set of psychologists and linguists, including members of the Penn team, have long argued that the sheer number of statistical comparisons necessary to learn words this way is simply beyond the capabilities of human memory.... rich interactions with children-and patience-are more important than abstract picture books and drilling."

Abstract : According to Byram (1997), intercultural competence means to be able to interact efficiently with persons from various countries in a foreign language. The paper introduces a new (...)

Studies suggest a link between negative cognition (a.k.a. negative thinking) and increased propensity for guilt, chronic anxiety clinical depression. (Apparently, women are more prone to negative cognition than men.) Psychology professor Emeritus Tom Stevens of California State University describes some common negative thinking pitfalls and offers advice as to what you can do instead. Research has supported the efficacy of cognitive therapy (called cognitive restructuring) that replaces these styles with more positive thinking. 1. Negative bias. Negative bias is a tendency to look at the more negative side of some event, person, object, or situation. It gives a negative interpretation or a negative point of view for looking at a situation. Instead think: I will assume the best instead of assume the worst. Positive self-fulfilling prophesies tend to create positive outcomes; negative self-fulfilling prophesies tend to create negative outcomes. Negative explanations of my own or other peoples' underlying motives cause me to intensify my anger or other negative feelings. Assuming the world is a hostile place creates fear, anxiety, and anger. 2. Negative selective abstraction. Selective abstraction means taking negative features of a situation out of context and exaggerating their significance. Usually it also means negating positive features. Example: A student who gets four "A"s and one "C," then focuses on the "C's." Instead think: I will list at least one positive feature for each negative feature. I will limit my focus on negative features to constructive thoughts about how I can either accept or change the negative features. 3. Overgeneralization. When we overgeneralize, we assume far-reaching conclusions from limited data. A student made a "D" on one test. She overgeneralizes, she doesn't just think "Well, I messed up on that one test. Instead, "I may not pass the course, not ever finish college." "I must be stupid and a failure." "My whole life is ruin

If you want to understand how the peach emoji has come to represent both the potential impeachment of President Trump and a butt, you must first look to the ancient Sumerians. Cuneiform, their early system of writing, began as a series of pictograms, and some characters represented multiple words or concepts. But it could be "tricky to represent something in the abstract," said Vyvyan Evans, a British linguistics professor and author of "The Emoji Code." So the Sumerians would repurpose an existing pictogram that had resonance with the hard-to-illustrate concept.

Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, examines laughter as a means of exploring mechanisms and evolution of vocal production, perception and social behavior. He examines laugh structure, compares human to chimp laughter, sociolinguistic contexts of laughter, the contagiousness of laughter, and pinpoints directions for future study. This article, originally printed in American Scientist 84. 1 (Jan-Feb, 1996): 38-47, is a more in-depth, scholarly article than the other, related article on laughter that I posted: Provine's "The Science of Laughter."

There's new reason to believe so-called "digital natives" really do think differently in response to technology: It may be "priming" them to think more concretely and remember details-rather than the big picture-when they work on a screen. Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem, found a series of experiments detailed in the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Using a digital format can develop a "mental 'habit' of triggering a more detail-focused mindset, one that prioritizes processing local, immediate information rather than considering more abstract, decontextualized interpretations of information," wrote researchers Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth College and Geoff Kaufman of Carnegie Mellon University.

Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of written language since there was such a thing as written language. "What is virtually certain," writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, is "that the first written symbols began life as pictures." Pictograms-i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the sun-were the very first elements of written communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at the same time.

emojis were born from a man named Shigetaka Kurita back in the late 1990s. They came up with emojis as a way to appeal to teens. Emoji which is a japanese neologism means "picture word". A bunch of different emojis can actually be traced back to some Japanese custom or tradition.

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

ABSTRACT: The present investigation examined the impact of bicultural identity, bilingualism, and social context on the psychological adjustment of multicultural individuals.......We concluded that, in the process of managing multiple cultural environments and group loyalties, bilingual competence, and perceiving one's two cultural identities as integrated are important antecedents of beneficial psychological outcomes.

""When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds," says James Pennebaker. ... If the essay question was asked in a dry, confusing way, the students answered accordingly. If asked in a flighty, "Valley girl" way, the students punctuated their answers with "like," "sorta" and "kinda."... "Style words in the spouses' poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship's end," Ireland says." Unfortunately, the paper isn't online, but you can see the abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20804263

Thanks, Ryan. I think there will be a lot of interest in this research.

Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they're passed on, they're changed beyond recognition - as psychologists' investigations of how rumors evolve have shown. In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, "Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person's memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations… Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material." What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics - memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it.

Information set to music, suggests research, is better retained, as it taps into time- honored strategies that help information stick. Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. A study by Rubin showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics-memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it. Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A study just published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang it.

Abstract: The critical period hypothesis holds that first language acquisition must occur before cerebral lateralization is complete, at about the age of puberty. One prediction of this hypothesis is that second language acquisition will be relatively fast, successful, and qualitatively similar to first language only if it occurs before the age of puberty.