Social Sciences
New research from a lab at Florida State University reveals that self-control takes fuel — literally. When we exercise it, resisting temptations to misbehave, our fuel tank is depleted, making subsequent efforts at self-control more difficult.
Florida State psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues Kathleen D. Vohs, University of Minnesota, and Dianne M. Tice, Florida State, showed this with an experiment using the Stroop task, a famous way of testing strength of self-control. Participants in this task are shown color words that are printed in different-colored ink (like the word red…
CHICAGO – Using a novel imaging technique to study autistic children, researchers have found increased gray matter in the brain areas that govern social processing and learning by observation. Results of the study conducted at the Fay J. Lindner Center for Autism, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Bethpage, N.Y., were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
“Our findings suggest that the inability of autistic children to relate to people and life situations in an ordinary way may be the result of an abnormally functioning mirror…
Omega-3 fatty acids protect the brain against Parkinson’s disease, according to a study by Université Laval researchers published in the online edition of the FASEB Journal, the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. This study, supervised by Frederic Calon and Francesca Cicchetti, is the first to demonstrate the protective effect of a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids against Parkinson’s.
Parkinson’s disease is caused by the progressive death of the neurons responsible for producing dopamine, a neurotransmitter closely linked with movement control. The…
Is there an objective biological basis for the experience of beauty in art? Or is aesthetic experience entirely subjective? This question has been addressed in a paper by Cinzia Di Dio, Emiliano Macaluso and Giacomo Rizzolatti. The researchers used fMRI scans to study the neural activity in subjects with no knowledge of art criticism, who were shown images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures.
The ‘objective’ perspective was examined by contrasting images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures of canonical proportions, with images of the same sculptures whose proportions were altered to…
Vase or face? When presented with the well known optical illusion in which we see either a vase or the faces of two people, what we observe depends on the patterns of neural activity going on in our brains.
“In this example, whether you see faces or vases depends entirely on changes that occur in your brain, since the image always stays exactly the same,” said John Serences, a UC Irvine cognitive neuroscientist.
In a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Serences and co-author Geoffrey Boynton, associate professor at the University of Washington, found that when viewing…
Brain scans used to track changes in a dozen patients who received an experimental gene therapy show that the treatment normalizes brain function - and the effects are still present a year later.
Andrew Feigin, MD, and David Eidelberg, MD, of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research collaborated with Michael Kaplitt, MD, of Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan and others to deliver genes for glutamic acid decarboxylase (or GAD) into the subthalamic nucleus of the brain in Parkinson’s patients. The study was designed as a phase I safety study, and the genes were delivered to only one…
Our brain is very good at picking up speech even in a noisy room, an adaptation essential for holding a conversation at a cocktail party, and now we are beginning to understand the neural interactions that underlie this ability.
An international research team reports in BMC Biology how investigations using neuroimaging have revealed that the brain's left hemisphere helps discern the signal from the noise.
In our daily lives, we are exposed to many different sounds from multiple sources at the same time, from traffic noise to background chatter. These noisy signals interact and compete with…
In youth with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the brain matures in a normal pattern but is delayed three years in some regions, on average, compared to youth without the disorder, an imaging study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has revealed.
The delay in ADHD was most prominent in regions at the front of the brain’s outer mantle (cortex), important for the ability to control thinking, attention and planning. Otherwise, both groups showed a similar back-to-front wave of brain maturation with different…
A group of Spanish researchers has made a new proposal for classifying mood swings in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
Although there is a great heterogeneity of depressive states in bipolar patients, there is only one definition in international classifications for describing them. However, this variety seems particularly important to recognize because of the possible exacerbation of some of these bipolar depressive states by antidepressants.
The researchers aimed at assessing whether it is possible to distinguish different forms of bipolar depression using a…
The inconsistent expressions related to schizophrenia are newly structured in a recent study by researchers at the Universitas Pompeau Fabra (Barcelona), and Oxford University. Marco Loh, Edmund Rolls and Gustavo Deco have created a dynamical system framework to discuss the disorder.
People with schizophrenia are known to have difficulty in maintaining attention, unstable thoughts, and reduced emotions. Creating a unifying and statistical model to understand these symptoms has always posed a challenge to researchers and clinicians. For this study Loh et al. developed a top-down analytical…