Psychology

Is it possible to share a pain that you observe in another but have never actually experienced yourself?  A new study uses brain-imaging  to try and answer this question and the research,  published in Neuron, may provide insight into the brain mechanisms involved in empathy. Brain-imaging studies have shown similar patterns of brain activity when subjects feel their own emotions or observe the same emotions in others. It has been suggested that a person who has never experienced a specific feeling would have a difficult time directly empathizing with a person through a "mirror…

Some men are Baptists, others Catholics; my father was an Oldsmobile man - Jean Shepherd, "A Christmas Story" Do you have brand loyalty?   Some of it may be historical ideas of quality, to be sure - if you bought a Mercedes-Benz this decade it was likely because it used to be that you paid more for better quality - but some of it is just materialism - if you bought a Mercedes-Benz this decade you also discovered that marketing people figure that if you were dumb enough to pay double for basically Hyundai quality you will be dumb enough to pay $1000 for the CD player they didn't include…

This fascinating article at Scientific American, about human and animal consciousness, contains the following passage:"In humans, the short-term storage of symbolic information—as when you enter an acquaintance’s phone number into your iPhone’s memory—is associated with conscious processing."A few years ago, when I was first learning about memory, the example probably would have gone more like "your short term memory holds small amounts of information, like a phone number, while you rehearse it in your head until you have it memorized." The main difference between the examples is that the…

The movement of facial skin and muscles around the mouth plays an important role not only in the way the sounds of speech are made, but also in the way they are heard according to a study by scientists at Haskins Laboratories, a Yale-affiliated research laboratory.  "How your own face is moving makes a difference in how you 'hear' what you hear," said first author Takayuki Ito, a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories. When, Ito and his colleagues used a robotic device to stretch the facial skin of "listeners" in a way that would normally accompany speech production they found it…

There may be a simple way to address racial bias: Help people improve their ability to distinguish between faces of individuals of a different race, according to Brown University and University of Victoria researchers who say they learned this through a new measurement system and protocol they developed to train Caucasian subjects to recognize different African American faces. "The idea is this that this sort of perceptual training gives you a new tool to address the kinds of biases people show unconsciously and may not even be aware they have," said Michael J. Tarr, the Sidney A. and…

In the first-ever study of food advertisements in UK magazines, researchers found them filled with sugary, salt-filled options often contradicting the health messages the articles were trying to put across.  That means that women sitting down to enjoy some reading with their cup of tea and a chocolate bar may be tempted to an even unhealthier diet.  Newcastle University researchers collected and compared data on the nutritional content of the foods advertised in 30 most widely-read weekly magazines during November 2007.  A detailed nutritional analysis of the foods in the…

A review article published in the European journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics says there is a relationship between depression and bone metabolism. The study says that the association between psychiatric illness, in particular depression, and osteoporosis has been the subject of a growing body of research yielding various findings, although most identify some effect on bone. In addition to medication-related processes and/or modifiable lifestyle factors associated with mood disturbances, endocrine and immune alteration secondary to depression may play a pathogenetic role in bone…

In my experience, scientists are much too dismissive; most of them have a hard time fully appreciating other people’s work. This dismissiveness follows a kind of power law: a few of them spend a large amount of time being dismissive (e.g., David Freedman); a large number spend a small amount of time being dismissive. The really common form of dismissiveness goes like this (from a JAMA abstract): In this second article, we enumerate the major issues in judging the validity of these studies, framed as critical appraisal questions. Was the disease phenotype properly defined and accurately…

The word "hypnosis" conjures a very specific image to most people - usually a man dangling a watch on a chain in front of your eyes and making you count backwards until you fall into some sort of deep trance, where the hypnotist can make you squawk like a chicken or convince you there are bugs in your pants. Judging by the stupid things subjects often do during a hypnotist's show, people often conclude that hypnosis gives the hypnotist total control over his subjects like a puppeteer pulling strings on a marionette. As a result, people don't often think of hypnosis as a viable medical…

If you've made a New Year's resolution but you keep putting it off, you may not just be unclear on what the word 'resolute' means, you may have an issue putting tasks in concrete terms that make them feel like they need to be completed. Procrastination is a curse, and a costly one. Putting things off leads not only to lost productivity but also to all sorts of hand wringing and regrets and damaged self-esteem. For all these reasons, psychologists would love to figure out what's going on in the mind that makes it so hard to actually do what we set out to do. Are we programmed for postponement…