Group items tagged

Stephen Porges, psychiatry professor and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute, speaks about the importance of safety in relationships. Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how our autonomic nervous system mediates safety, trust, and intimacy through a subsystem he calls the social engagement system. Our brain is constantly detecting through our senses whether we are in a situation that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. People's autonomic nervous system are designed to perceive threat: a protective, defensive survival mechanism, but a response that can also get us into trouble if we sense that our safety is at risk, causing us to misread the situation. However, humans also have a mammalian mechanism that mediates those gut-level ANS responses. This social engagement system enables us to interpret linguistic, facial, tonal, intonation, and gestural cues, and the intentionality of others. When our body and mind experience safety, our social engagement system enables us to collaborate, listen, empathize, and connect, as well as be creative, innovative, and bold in our thinking and ideas. This has positive benefits for our relationships as well as our lives in general. The takeaways: 1. Safety is paramount in crucial conversations and conflict-resolution. 2. Learning to deploy cues that display love, trust, and engagement in the midst of conflict can help disarm defensive, threat response mechanisms in other people, help restore safety in our social interactions, and reaffirm bonds.

A Liverpool University study found reading poetry lights up both the left part of the brain concerned with language, as well as the right hemisphere, an area that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion. Reading triggers "reappraisal mechanisms" that cause people to reflect on their own experiences in light of what they read. The study might also suggest that word choice and sound are crucial elements in creating beneficial literary experiences: more "challenging" prose and poetry (striking wording/phrasing, complex syntax) sparks far more electrical activity in the brain than more pedestrian translations of those passages.

Brain imaging studies have explored the neural mechanisms of recovery in adults following acquired disorders and, more recently, childhood developmental disorders. However, the neural systems underlying adult rehabilitation of neurobiologically based learning disabilities remain unexplored, despite their high incidence. Here we characterize the differences in brain activity during a phonological manipulation task before and after a behavioral intervention in adults with developmental dyslexia. Phonologically targeted training resulted in performance improvements in tutored compared to nontutored dyslexics, and these gains were associated with signal increases in bilateral parietal and right perisylvian cortices. Our findings demonstrate that behavioral changes in tutored dyslexic adults are associated with (1) increased activity in those left-hemisphere regions engaged by normal readers and (2) compensatory activity in the right perisylvian cortex. Hence, behavioral plasticity in adult developmental dyslexia involves two distinct neural mechanisms, each of which has previously been observed either for remediation of developmental or acquired reading disorders.

"Now in the 21st century, with sophisticated text-crunching tools at our disposal, it is possible to put Bridgman's theory to the test. Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?"

13 year old Trisha Prabhu of Naperville, IL, is a finalist in Google Science Fair 2014. Prabhu's project focuses on preventing cyber-bullying. Excerpted from her project summary statement: "Cyberbullying may result in depression, low self-esteem and in rare cases suicides in adolescent victims(12-18). Research shows that, over 50% of adolescents and teens have been bullied online and 10 to 20% experience it regularly. Research also shows that adolescents that post mean/hurtful messages may not understand the potential consequences of their actions because the pre-frontal cortex, the area of brain that controls reasoning and decision-making isn't developed until age 25. I hypothesized that if adolescents(ages 12-18) were provided an alert mechanism that suggested them to re-think their decision if they expressed willingness to post a mean/hurtful message on social media, the number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents will be willing to post would be lesser than adolescents that are not provided with such an alert mechanism. In order to check if my hypothesis was true, I created two Software systems: 1) Baseline 2) Rethink. "Rethink" system measured number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents were willing to post after being alerted to rethink, while the "Baseline" system measured the same without the alert. Results proved that adolescents were 93.43% less willing to post mean/hurtful messages using a "Rethink" system compared with "Baseline" system without alert."

Northwestern University researchers, led by Dr Nina Kraus, found that poor readers had reduced neural response (auditory brainstem activity) to rhythmic rather than random sounds compared to good readers. In fact the level of neural enhancement to acoustic regularities correlated with reading ability as well as musical aptitude. The musical ability test, specifically the rhythm aspect, was also related to reading ability. Similarly a good score on the auditory working memory related to better reading and to the rhythm aspect of musical ability. Dr Kraus explained, "Both musical ability and literacy correlated with enhanced electrical signals within the auditory brainstem. Structural equation modeling of the data revealed that music skill, together with how the nervous system responds to regularities in auditory input and auditory memory/attention accounts for about 40% of the difference in reading ability between children. These results add weight to the argument that music and reading are related via common neural and cognitive mechanisms and suggests a mechanism for the improvements in literacy seen with musical training."

Abstract: Self-affirmation theory posits that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-view and that threats to perceived self-competence are met with resistance. When threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing individuals to reflect on sources of self-worth, such as core values. Many questions exist, however, about the underlying mechanisms associated with self-affirmation. We examined the neural mechanisms of self-affirmation with a task developed for use in a functional magnetic resonance imaging environment. Results of a region of interest analysis demonstrated that participants who were affirmed (compared with unaffirmed participants) showed increased activity in key regions of the brain's self-processing (medial prefrontal cortex + posterior cingulate cortex) and valuation (ventral striatum + ventral medial prefrontal cortex) systems when reflecting on future-oriented core values (compared with everyday activities). Furthermore, this neural activity went on to predict changes in sedentary behavior consistent with successful affirmation in response to a separate physical activity intervention. These results highlight neural processes associated with successful self-affirmation, and further suggest that key pathways may be amplified in conjunction with prospection.

Recent studies suggest that metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. In their first experiment, they divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded-rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group. Afterwards, volunteers were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Those who recalled memories of being ostracized experienced the ambient temperature of the room as colder. In a second experiment, researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out. Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the "unpopular" volunteers who had been ostracized during the computer game were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or hot coffee. Their preference for warm food and drinks presumably resulted from physically feeling cold as a result of being excluded. "It's striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded," Leonardelli said. "Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation."

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."

Melody Jackson, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, has been outfitting service dogs with computerized vests, so that in an emergency they can find another human and pull a mechanical lever on the vest that triggers an audio message: My handler needs you to come with me!

Dr Katie Slocombe and Dr Anne Schel, of the Department of Psychology at York, examined the degree of intentionality wild chimpanzees have over their alarm calls. The study shows that chimpanzees appear to produce certain alarm calls intentionally in a tactical and goal directed way--they are not simply fear-based reactions. In Uganda, the researchers presented wild chimpanzees with a moving snake model and monitored their vocal and behavioural responses. They found that the chimpanzees were more likely to produce alarm calls when close friends arrived in the vicinity. They looked at and monitored group members both before and during the production of calls and critically, they continued to call until all group members were safe from the predator. Together these behaviours indicate the calls are produced intentionally to warn others of the danger. Dr Slocombe said: "These behaviours indicate that these alarm calls were produced intentionally to warn others of danger and thus the study shows a key similarity in the mechanisms involved in the production of chimpanzee vocalisations and human language. "Our results demonstrate that certain vocalisations of our closest living relatives qualify as intentional signals, in a directly comparable way to many great ape gestures, indicating that language may have originated from a multimodal vocal-gestural communication system."

Maltz and Borker argue that "American men and women come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in a conversation, so that when they attempt to carry on conversations with one another, even if both parties are attempting to treat one another as equals, cultural miscommunication results." Their article also provides a literature review of various studies examining male-female miscommunication. Here's the synopsis of the differences discovered in female vs. male conversation. Women generally 1. Display a greater tendency to ask questions. 2. Tend to facilitate and elicit interaction more. 3. Make greater use of positive minimal responses, e.g. "mm...I see", and insert them mid-conversation. 4. More likely to adopt a "silent protest" response to interruption 5. Greater tendency to use the pronouns "you" and "we", explicitly acknowledging the presence of the other. In contrast, men are 1. More likely to interrupt 2. More likely to challenge or dispute their partners' utterances 3. more likely to ignore the comments of the other speaker, that is, to offer no response or acknowledgment at all, or respond reluctantly 4. Utilize more mechanisms for controlling the topic of conversation 5. more likely to make direct declarations.

good explanation of clauses and commas

This article answers that question!

This article is relevant to the Genie case, outlining the many ways isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and are also more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Loneliness also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation unleashes an extreme immune response - a cascade of stress hormones and inflammation. This response might've been biologically advantageous for our early ancestors, when being isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for modern humans, the outcome is mostly harmful. A 1957 McGill University study, recreated in 2008 by Professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at St George's Hospital, Tooting, found that after only a matter of hours, people deprived of perceptual stimulation and meaningful human contact, started to crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word association tests. In addition, subjects started hallucinating. The brain is used to processing large quantities of data, but in the absence of sensory input, Robbins states that "the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain's central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn't make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern." It tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

There are many ways that we can express our identities. We can alter the way we look, the things we're interested in, the way we dress. But one thing we're pretty much stuck with is our voice. Sure the words coming from our mouths can be tailored to a situation or a desired persona, but the actual sound of our voice is difficult to change. For writer David Thorpe, the sound of his own voice always had him contemplating the same question: "Do I sound gay?" However, his wasn't simply an inquisitive statement; it was an expression of dissatisfaction that he had a gay voice, even though he was openly gay. Using his own struggle with his identity as the common thread, he consults linguists who illuminate the mechanical traits of gay speech and attribute this common characteristic to a strong feminine influence in the early lives of gay men.

Researchers at Harvard University have found that humans aren't the only ones who can groove to a beat - some other species can dance, too. The capability was previously believed to be specific to humans. The research team found that only species with the capacity for vocal mimicry, that is, copying sound, seem capable of beat induction, the ability to discern the beat in music. Beat induction also enables such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. The data suggests that some of the brain mechanisms needed for human dance may have originally evolved to allow us to imitate sound.