Psychology
grrlscientist | June 30, 2010tags: birds, ornithology, Common Raven, Northern Raven, Corvus corax, animal behavior, animal culture, aggression, dominance hierarchy, social groups, social conflict, post-conflict behavior, consolation, empathy, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Common Raven, Corvus corax, showing off at Bryce Canyon National Park, USA.
Image: United States National Park Service (Public Domain) [larger view]
Humans have long tried to distinguish themselves from other animals on the basis of characters that are perceived to be unique, such as tool design and use, planning for the…
neurophilosophy | June 25, 2010APPLYING for a job? The weight of the clipboard to which your CV is attached may influence your chances of getting it. Negotiating a deal? Sitting in a hard chair may lead you to drive a harder bargain. Those are two of the surprising conclusions of a study published in today's issue of Science, which shows that the physical properties of objects we touch can unconsciously influence our first impressions of other people and the decisions we make about them.
Josh Ackerman of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and psychologists Chris Nocera and John Bargh of Harvard and Yale Universities,…
clock | June 2, 2010Hi Café Friends,
Our June Science Café (description below) will be held on Tuesday 6/15 at the Irregardless Café on Morgan Street. Our café speaker for the evening will be Dr. Dianne Dunning from the NCSU School of Veterinary Medicine. Join us for a thought provoking discussion with Dr. Dunning about the relationships humans have with animals in our increasingly crowded world.
The Human-Animal Bond
Tuesday June 15, 2010
Time: 6:30 - 8:30 pm with discussions beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898
Animals touch our…
grrlscientist | May 28, 2010tags: Inside a School for Suicide Bombers, Taliban, brainwashing, mind control, suicide bombers, propaganda, religion, cults, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy takes on a terrifying question: How does the Taliban convince children to become suicide bombers? Propaganda footage from a training camp is intercut with interviews of young camp graduates. A shocking vision.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in…
omnibrain | May 18, 2010I'm sure by now you've heard about inattentional blindness, as I've posted about it a million times since this blog began. It's an amazing effect! It shows us that we really aren't as aware of the world as we think we are. If you haven't heard about it by now I encourage you to go right here to try out a demo on yourself! Inattentional blindness isn't the only time this happens though, there are a number of cognitive illusions that make you realize you're a lot stupider than you thought you were.
There's a brand new book out today by the semi-discoverers of inattentional blindness (well…
clock | May 17, 2010
New podcast and forum at PRI World Science:
Listen to a story by reporter Laura Starecheski, followed by our interview with Ethan Watters.
Our guest in the Science Forum is journalist Ethan Watters.
His latest book is Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.
"America is homogenizing the way the world goes mad," Watters writes. He contends that Americans are exporting their view of mental illness to the rest of the world.
Watters says culture influences not only how people deal with mental disorders but how mental disorders manifest themselves. Yet those cultural differences…
omnibrain | May 17, 2010This year I was asked to participate in the Illusion of the year contest and it was a blast! There were a bunch of great illusions and I had no idea who was going to win it until the votes were counted. There's even some great video of me acting in one of the presentations. Anyway here's a video of one of the contestants using me - can you guess who I am?
Keep reading for a video of the 1st place winner and links for the 2nd and 3rd place winners!
Here's the first place illusion:
And 2nd Place and 3rd Place. Both totally worth watching on neuralcorrelates.org.
omnibrain | May 16, 2010The monkey business illusion.
Did it work on you?
This video is great especially since most people studying psychology have seen the original gorilla video. This even worked on a group of the most important vision scientists in the world at a recent Vision Sciences Society annual meeting.
Also, check out the invisiblegorilla.com for more videos and posts by Dan Simons!
grrlscientist | May 9, 2010tags: Did Religion Have an Evolutionary Value?, religion, psychology, social structure, social commentary, cultural observation, Richard Dawkins, streaming video
Richard Dawkins argues that humanity's historical predisposition towards religion and supernatural beliefs may have held an evolutionary utility. "The rule of thumb: 'Believe whatever your parents tell you,' quite clearly could have survival value," says Dawkins.
He's the King of All the Atheists (um, yeah, right), and now Richard Dawkins is hammering home what he sees as his key argument against the existence of God. In his book,…
neurophilosophy | April 21, 2010WHEN talking about our feelings, we often use expressions that link emotions with movements or positions in space. If, for example, one receives good news, they might say that their "spirit soared", or that they are feeling "on top of the world". Conversely, negative emotions are associated with downward movements and positions - somebody who is sad is often said to be "down in the dumps", or feeling "low".
According to a new study published in this month's issue of the journal Cognition, expressions such as these are not merely metaphorical. The research provides evidence of a causal link…
neurophilosophy | April 16, 2010DO you smile because you're happy, or are you happy because you are smiling? Darwin believed that facial expressions are indeed important for experiencing emotions. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he wrote that "the free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it...[whereas]...the repression...of all outward signs softens our emotions." This idea was subsequently elaborated by the great psychologist William James, who suggested that "every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object."
Botox, which is used by…
jgoldman | April 12, 2010The party isn't over yet! Here's another helping of Monday Pets. Enjoy!
Wild Dog crawled into the Cave and laid his head on the Woman's lap... And the Woman said, "His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend."
--Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling.
Archaeological evidence indicates that dogs were already a part of human society around the end of the Ice Age. Small dog skeletons have been unearthed in human communities as far back as 6- to 12-thousand years ago in Europe, the Middle East, and China. The jawbone of a domestic dog was found in a late Paleolithic grave in Germany, and…
grrlscientist | April 1, 2010tags: writer's block, psychology, abnormal psychology, cognitive psychology, writing, publishing, career, publish or perish, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Sources:
Didden, R., Sigafoos, J., O'Reilly, M., Lancioni, G., & Sturmey, P. (2007). A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication of Upper's (1974) Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer's Block. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40 (4), 773-773 DOI: 10.1901/jaba.2007.773
Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block". Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis…
cevans | March 29, 2010
My Very Excellent Mother Just Served us Nine Pizzas.
My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets.
My Very Early Morning Jam Sandwiches Usually Nauseate People.
Mon Vieux Tu M'as Jeté Sur Une Nouvelle Planète!
-- Various mnemonic devices for remembering the order of the nine planets
I just found out that Mercury is shrinking.
The planet, already our most diminutive neighbor, has lost around 3 miles of its 3,000 mile diameter in its life, or one tenth of one percent.This may not sound like much, but in geological terms, three miles is immensely significant.
This boggling fact was…
edyong | March 22, 2010Like it or not, the golden arches of McDonalds are one of the most easily recognised icons of the modern world. The culture they represent is one of instant gratification and saved time, of ready-made food that can be bought cheaply and eaten immediately. Many studies have looked at the effects of these foods on our waistlines, but their symbols and brands are such a pervasive part of our lives that you'd expect them to influence the way we think too.
And so they do - Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe have found that fast food can actually induce haste and impatience, in ways that have nothing…
edyong | March 19, 2010
We like to be in control of our own lives, and some of us have an automatic rebellious streak when we're told what to do. We're less likely to do a task if we're ordered to do it than if we make the choice of our own volition. It seems that this effect is so strong that it even happens when the people giving the orders are... us.
In a set of three experiments, Ibrahim Senay from the University of Illinois has shown that people do better at a simple task if ask themselves whether they'll do it than if they simply tell themselves to do so. Even a simple reversal of words - "Will I" compared…
omnibrain | March 16, 2010It seems that if you eat on a full brain you are more likely to make poor eating decisions.
So here's the schtick via Weighty Matters:
Simple experimental design. Take 165 undergraduate students and enroll them in a study you tell them is about memory and where as part of their reward for inclusion, they'll be given a snack. Ask half of them to memorize a 2 digit number and the other half a 7 digit number and once they've memorized their numbers ask them to go into a second room where they are faced with their snack choice - either a piece of chocolate cake or a cup of fruit salad. Track…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2010tags: Tommy Davis, scientology, religion, cults, mind control, Thetan, silly, offbeat, beliefs, Xenu, L Ron Hubbard, television, BBC, CBS, streaming video
This is an interview with Tommy Davis, international Scientology spokesman, regarding the tragic death of Jett Travolta due to the medical neglect that their cult demands from its adherents, including Jett's parents. Davis is very scummy because he never gives a straight answer to any question asked. I also have embedded some other videos of Davis, where he reveals his less than angelic side.
Incidentally, Tommy Davis (the guy being…