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Mon, 17 Jun 2013 Diet may affect Alzheimer's disease risk
The lipidation states (or modifications) in certain proteins in the brain that are related to the development of Alzheimer disease appear to differ depending on genotype and cognitive diseases, and levels of these protein and peptides appear to be influenced by diet, according to a new report.
Mon, 17 Jun 2013 Missing enzyme linked to drug addiction
A missing brain enzyme increases concentrations of a protein related to pain-killer addiction, according to an animal study.
Mon, 17 Jun 2013 Voices may not trigger brain's reward centers in children with autism
In autism, brain regions tailored to respond to voices are poorly connected to reward-processing circuits, according to a new study.
Mon, 17 Jun 2013 Testosterone improves verbal learning and memory in postmenopausal women
Postmenopausal women had better improvement in verbal learning and memory after receiving treatment with testosterone gel, compared with women who received sham treatment with a placebo, a new study found.
Mon, 17 Jun 2013 People attribute minds to robots, corpses that are targets of harm
As Descartes famously noted, there's no way to really know that another person has a mind -- every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now, new research suggests that victimization may be one condition that leads us to perceive minds in others, even in entities we don't normally think of as having minds, such as a corpse or a robot.
BPS Research Digest Blog
What stereotypes do Europeans of today hold about men and women's intuition?
That was in 1904. Fast forward a hundred years, what beliefs do modern-day Europeans still hold about the intuition of men and women? Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues surveyed 1016 men and women in Germany and 1002 in Spain to find out."She works by intuition and feeling;" wrote the US psychologist G. Stanley Hall of the typical woman, "fear, anger, pity, love, and most of the emotions have a wider range and greater intensity [than in men]."
Overall, the participants didn't see either sex as having more intuition than the other. But that's because they held stereotypes about the intuitive strengths of the sexes in different domains. In both Germany and Spain, the majority of participants believed that women's intuitions are better when it comes to personal life. For instance, 63 per cent of Germans believed that women's intuitions about choosing the right romantic partner are superior (and the figures were almost identical in Spain). Gigerenzer's team said there could be some validity to a related stereotype held by their participants: the idea that women are better at understanding other people's intentions. After all, there is evidence, the researchers said, that women are better at recognising emotional displays than men.
In relation to intuitions in a "professional social context", there was no overall sex-related stereotype about leadership intuition (this may also be an accurate reflection of fact, since studies show companies with more women in leadership positions do at least as well, if not better, than those with fewer women). Both countries showed a weak preference for believing that men have a better intuition for choosing a business partner and in politics.
Beliefs about intuitions in the last domain of "professional individual tasks" were stronger and exposed the greatest differences between the countries. In Spain, the majority of men and women believed that the sexes have equally good intuition for scientific discoveries; in contrast, in Germany only one third felt the same, with most people favouring men. This study can't speak to cause and effect, but it's notable that a greater percentage of scientists in Spain are female.
Participants in both countries also endorsed the stereotype that men have better intuition for dangerous situations, but this was almost entirely down the beliefs held by men! In both countries, men and women further endorsed the stereotype that men have better intuition for investing in stocks. This actually flies in the face of research that has found women to be more effective at portfolio investment.
Across the whole study there was evidence of in-group bias - men and women tended to attribute more credit to the intuition of their own sex. Intriguingly, there was no difference in beliefs with age group. This led the researchers to suppose that people's beliefs about the intuitive skills of the sexes is based on the current social context rather than the past. If the past had had more influence you'd expect older participants to endorse more traditional stereotypes.
Related to this, it was curious that gender-stereotypes were more often endorsed in Germany even though this country has been a liberal democracy for longer than Spain and is said to value gender-egalitarianism more strongly. The researchers said this may reflect the fact that Spain is catching up fast and maybe even overtaking Germany. We already discussed Spain's female advantage in science. Despite Germany having a female Chancellor, it's also a fact that there is a larger percentage of female politicians in Spain.
All all in all Gigerenzer and his team concluded their study shows "widespread stereotypes about men's and women's intuitions still exist even a century after the first president of the American Psychological Association made his infamous statement."
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Gigerenzer, G., Galesic, M., and Garcia-Retamero, R. (2013). Stereotypes About Men's and Women's Intuitions: A Study of Two Nations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology DOI: 10.1177/0022022113487074
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
2013-06-14 Link feast
1. The fascinating story of how fall out from Cold War atomic bomb tests has helped, decades later, to settle the debate over whether or not adult brains can grow new neurons. The new findings suggest that more than 1400 new neurons are added to the adult hippocampus every day!
2. How do people survive solitary confinement? Also the focus of this afternoon's (3.30BST) episode of The Truth About Mental Health on BBC World Service.
3. How much consciousness does an iPhone have? Interesting blog post on phi - a way of measuring consciousness. But it's a cheeky headline - iPhones are barely mentioned in the article.
4. Michael Jackson was a paradox - the world's greatest showman and yet so bashful in person. Scott Barry Kaufman, author of a new book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, explains that such a contradictory personality is actually common place among creative people.
5. Ever get that feeling that, no matter how much practice you put in, your progress seems to have stalled? I found this post over at 99U really inspiring: 3 Tips on Overcoming Learning Plateaus.
6. BBC Radio 4 started a new series of Frontiers this week, featuring scientists who are building brains from scratch. ""I believe these cultures are half-way to having a mind," says neuroengineer Steve Potter.
7. With all the recent talk about the need for replications in psychology and better rules about the storage and sharing of data, cognitive psychologist Rolf Zwaan urges us not to forget the value of weirdness and wackiness in science. Interesting post, but it felt like a bit of a false dichotomy to me. Surely science can be open, replicable and wacky.
8. This is your brain on coffee.
9. Need a gift idea for the neuroscientist in your life? - neuroscience dress featuring retinal ganglion cells (ht @vaughanbell)
10. Psychology confirms what Jerry Seinfeld knew - we'd enjoy restaurant meals more if we could pay for them in advance. Fun and interesting blog post by Dave Nussbaum based on a new book Happy Money.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
2013-06-13 A preliminary psychology of "keeping it real"
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| Keeping it real often means hanging out |
Lenton and her colleagues began by surveying 104 participants (average age 35; 66 women) on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MT) website that pays people for completing tasks online. The participants said they experienced a state of authenticity one to two times per week, and experienced inauthenticity nearly every two months. They were strongly motivated (5.8 on a scale of 1 to 7) to be their true selves and similarly motivated to avoid inauthenticity (5.2 on the same scale). The state of being true to oneself was different from the personality trait of being a "genuine person" - people reported experiencing both authenticity and inauthenticity regardless of their personality.
Hundreds of people were also recruited to write about either a time they'd felt most true to themselves, or a time they felt like they were being fake. Experiences of self authenticity tended to involve fun, familiar places or people, close others, helping someone or being creative. They were also associated with "low arousal" positive emotions like contentment and calmness, and the fulfilment of personal needs, especially self-esteem, relatedness to others and autonomy. "I was with my girlfriend and three best friends and we stayed there [at the millpond in Cambridge] late drinking, chilling out, and talking about our lives and childhoods," said one participant. "I was really happy at that moment in life and felt relaxed, honest, that nothing else mattered or would ever change."
Episodes of inauthenticity, by contrast, were associated with difficult events, being evaluated by others, demonstrating a lack of social competence, feeling isolated, failing one's own standards and feeling ill. The "signature" emotion of being phoney was anxiety, and there was a sense of failing to fulfil any personal needs. "The buildings were completely unrecognisable as were the people," said one person of their first day at uni. "I felt as though I was alone and had lost my sense of self."
One particularly intriguing finding - participants describing a time they'd felt authentic, as opposed to phoney, tended to say the experience overlapped far more with their ideal self. There's an obvious contradiction here. If they were being themselves, how come they resembled their ideal self, which is likely to be influenced by social expectations? One possibility is that what we really mean by "be true to yourself" is "be the person you want to be".
This recalls an intriguing study published in 2010, in which people reported feeling more authentic when they were behaving in an extraverted, agreeable and open-minded way, regardless of whether this matched their own personality. Behaving this way usually means certain needs are being met, including closeness with others and being competent. Another possibility, then, is that by "keeping it real" we really mean - satisfy the basic human desire to connect with others and be a creative, good person.
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Lenton, A., Bruder, M., Slabu, L., & Sedikides, C. (2013). How Does “Being Real” Feel? The Experience of State Authenticity. Journal of Personality, 81 (3), 276-289 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2012.00805.x
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Cognitive Daily
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 Cognitive Daily Closes Shop after a Fantastic Five-Year Run
Five years ago today, we made the first post that would eventually make its way onto a blog called Cognitive Daily. We thought we were keeping notes for a book, but in reality we were helping build a network that represented a new way of sharing psychology with the world. Cognitive Daily wasn’t the first…
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 Both musicians and non-musicians can perceive bitonality
Take a listen to this brief audio clip of “Unforgettable.” Aside from the fact that it’s a computer-generated MIDI performance, do you hear anything unusual? If you’re a non-musician like me, you might not have noticed anything. It sounds basically like the familiar song, even though the synthesized sax isn’t nearly as pleasing as the…
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 Synesthesia and the McGurk effect
We’ve discussed synesthesia many times before on Cognitive Daily — it’s the seemingly bizarre phenomenon when one stimulus (e.g. a sight or a sound) is experienced in multiple modalities (e.g. taste, vision, or colors). For example, a person might experience a particular smell whenever a given word or letter is seen or heard. Sometimes particular…