mixingmemory | March 27, 2007Research on the role of emotion/intuition in moral judgments is really heating up. For decades (millennia, even), moral judgment was thought to be a conscious, principle-based process, but over the last few years, researchers have been showing that emotion and intuition, both of which operate automatically and unconsciously for the most part, play a much larger role than most philosophers and psychologists had previously been willing to admit. In this context, two recent papers by roughly the same group of people have presented some really interesting findings which, if you ask me (and if you…
mixingmemory | March 26, 2007
When I was an undergrad, my intro psych professor mentioned research in industrial/organizational psychology indicating that the color red causes people to be happier and more productive, while blue makes people sadder and less productive. Later I was taught that the relationship between color and performance was actually more complex. Specifically, I was taught that colors with higher wave lengths (like red) cause arousal, while colors with smaller wavelengths are soothing. Until a couple years ago, though, I'd never actually read any research on the topic. My knowledge was all hearsay.…
mixingmemory | March 25, 2007
I have to do a little fatherly bragging. My son (#3) started playing baseball this year. He's 9, so he's starting a bit later -- much later than almost all of the players in his league. So he's got some catching up to do. Yesterday, I went to his first game. That's him out there in right field (you can barely see him).
Right field is where they stick the least experienced player, of course, because in the 8-10 year old league, no one hits the ball to right. In fact, in the entire game, only 4 balls were hit into the outfield, and all 4 were hit by his team. So he didn't see any action on…
mixingmemory | March 18, 2007With a paper by Freedberg and Gallese, to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, mirror neurons have made their way into neuroaesthetics (at some point, someone like Gallese will publish a paper arguing that mirror neurons explain everything, and we'll begin to wonder what the hell the rest of the brain is for). Here's the abstract from the paper1:
The implications of the discovery of mirroring mechanisms and embodied simulation for empathetic responses to images in general, and to works of visual art in particular, have not yet been assessed. Here, we address this issue and we…
mixingmemory | March 14, 2007I'm sure you've all long forgotten about the framing project that I discussed on this blog late last year, but in case someone out there remembers it, I wanted to give you an update. I still want to collect the category norms that I discussed. That is, I want to have people list features of political concepts like abortion, social security, war, etc., along with concepts related to Lakoff's framing analysis such as family, nation, and the like (if you'd like to help me write the code for this, let me know). However, not long after I discussed the project on this blog, my perspective changed…
mixingmemory | March 13, 2007It turns out that Jeremy of PsyBlog is currently running a study on music and personality in the UK. So if you're reading this, and you live on one of those islands, you should go here and participate.
mixingmemory | March 12, 2007Since we now know that a person's music says a lot about what that person's like, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about myself by sharing some of my music. I can't give you a list of my ten favorite songs (the data Rentfrow and Gosling used in their study), because to be honest, my favorite songs change on an almost daily basis. So instead, I'll give you one song from each of the last ten albums I've listened to. They're not necessarily my favorite songs from those albums, because I was restricted to what I could find freely available online, but I do really like each of these songs. Most…
mixingmemory | March 12, 2007I went to a high school at a time (one not that different from most others, I imagine) when musical preferences were a good clue to social group membership. There were, for example, the punks who listened to, well, punk; the stoners who listened to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" over and over and over again; the hipsters, who listened to what was the hip music of the time (grunge); and the "popular" kids who listened to pop, pop rock, and country (I went to high school in Nashville, where country music was the popular music). We all assumed that what a person listened to could tell you a lot about…
mixingmemory | March 6, 2007In the discussion that resulted from the last couple posts on religion, a lot of claims have been made, all of which are empirical claims, and all of which thereby require data. But of course, there's not a whole lot of data out there, and what is out there is easy to interpret in a variety of ways (as the back and forth about whether religion is in fact declining in the western world shows, for example). But scientists are really beginning to tackle some of the more difficult empirical questions about religion. The going is slow, because religion is a vague term, religions are varied, and…
mixingmemory | March 1, 2007While I think it's obvious to anyone with eyes (a category that seems to grow smaller by the day) that within the anti-religious bigotry today there is an underlying feeling of superiority, an unliberal belittling of the little guy, a feeling that "Joe Schmoe" is stupid and to some extent worth less than the intellectually righteous secularist, there is another element to rabid atheist criticisms of religion that I find both disturbing and puzzling. As many of the comments to my recent post and Pharyngula's post on the same topic illustrate, these criticisms of religion are largely based on…
mixingmemory | February 28, 2007Here's a nominee for strangest psychology experiment ever, or at least spookiest. Yesterday I talked about the theory that religion, or at least supernatural agent concepts, serve to activate representational concerns, and thus increase prosocial behavior, or decrease selfish behavior. The experiment I'm about to describe was designed to test part of that theory. But given how odd the experiment is, I don't really care what the theoretical motivations for it were. It's post-worthy simply by virtue of its bizzarness.
The experiment, conducted by Bering et al.1, involved a boring enough task.…
mixingmemory | February 27, 2007For my aquarium:
The picture's from CNN. The caption reads:
The Antarctic ice fish is one of many species documented during a 10-week expedition exploring the Antarctic sea floor. Researchers examined marine life and uncovered potentially new species below the surface of the cold Antarctic water.
The ice fish has no red blood pigments or red blood cells. This adaptation to the frigid environment allows it to use less energy to pump blood through its body.
mixingmemory | February 27, 2007If you were hanging around ScienceBlogs yesterday, you probably came across this post at Pharyngula. In it, Dr. Myers links to an article on a study by Bushman et al.1 purporting to show that people are more aggressive after reading passages from the Bible in which God sanctions violence than after reading passages that don't involve sanctioning violence. In the study, two sets of participants, one from Brigham Young University, and the other from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, were told that they would be participating in two seprate studies. After being asked a few questions about their…
mixingmemory | February 22, 2007In a comment to the last post, "Korax" mentions a paper published online in Current Biology this week on chimpanzee tool use. The tool use described in this paper is, as far as I can tell, as or more complex than any previously witnessed in chimps. Here's the abstract:
Although tool use is known to occur in species ranging from naked mole rats [1] to owls [2], chimpanzees are the most accomplished tool users. The modification and use of tools during hunting, however, is still considered to be a uniquely human trait among primates. Here, we report the first account of habitual tool use during…
mixingmemory | February 14, 2007You've probably already come across this story, but just in case:
Oldest chimp tools found in West Africa
Apes could have passed down skills for thousands of years.
In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous oldest finds in the same area. The discovery suggests that chimps may have passed cultural information down the generations for more than 4,000 years.
I'm no archeologist, and since the paper doesn't seem to be on the PANAS website, as the Nature article says it should be, I couldn't evaluate the…
mixingmemory | February 9, 2007Here at Mixing Memory, Just Science week has turned into Mostly Wegner week. But the set of studies I'm going to talk about in this post has received so much attention that I just can't resist. You may have encountered it in the New York Times (you can read it here without a subscription). Unfortunately for me, in beating me to it, the NYT also stole my planned title, causing me to go with Barry Manilow over Lovin' Spoonful, but c'est la vie. Oh, I should probably say what this is all about at some point. It's about magic. Specifically, magical thinking. We've all experienced it (don't say…
mixingmemory | February 8, 2007Here's something I didn't know1:
Approximately 6 in every 100 words are affected by disfluency, including repetitions, corrections, and hesitations such as the fillers um and er. Moreover, the distribution of disfluency is not arbitrary. For example, fillers tend to occur before low frequency and unpredictable words, in circumstances where the speaker is faced with multiple semantic or syntactic possibilities, as well as in cases where other types of uncertainty occur. (p. 3)
Well, I knew that I hesitate in speech a lot (my son will often say to me, "Stop saying 'um!'"), but I didn't realize…
mixingmemory | February 7, 2007A while back, I linked to a paper analogically comparing money to drugs. Judging by the comments, those of you who read the paper weren't particularly impressed by it. But if you thought the money-drug analogy was odd, I've got a better one for you.
If you recall, the money as a drug paper by Stephen E. G. Lea argues against a purely instrumental, "tool" theory of the subjective value of money. From the money as a drug perspective, money doesn't serve purely practical purposes. Instead, people actually seek out money because it gives them some pleasure, like a drug. Apparently, a similar…
mixingmemory | February 6, 2007This isn't technically about science, but I wanted to remind everyone that the week of science challenge has begun (as of yesterday), and the Just Science webpage is aggregating the feeds of all the participating blogs. So if you're interested in reading a bunch of science blogging, including some by science blogs you probably haven't come across before, then head on over to the website.
UPDATE: Since I was suggesting you go read the feeds from all the participants, it would have been smart for me to link to the feed site. It's here. I'm sorry, I'm still learning about these newfangled…
mixingmemory | February 6, 2007Have you ever had a meeting, or a brain storming session, that involved a lot of coffee and enthusiasm, with everyone throwing out ideas at a breakneck pace, and quickly becoming convinced of their brilliance? I had just such a meeting one morning not too long ago. Everything moved really, really fast, and we were convinced that we'd hit upon a really good idea. Later that evening, everything about the idea that we'd come up with began to fall apart. The next morning, I woke up to an email from one of the meeting's participants with the subject heading, "Maybe this is why we thought it was…