Social Sciences

Why do some people quickly link up with mates who love them good and strong, while others gravitate to people who hurt them, dump them or withhold love? It's all in the neurochemistry. I've come up with a metaphor that helps explain this painful syndrome. When you're a little kid, you get used to your mom's spaghetti sauce; it's the one that tastes right, the one against which all other spaghetti sauces will be judged. (Please substitute latkes, baba ganoush, banh xeo or whatever; and for mom, use dad, another primary caregiver, or Boston Market.) When you leave home and get more experience,…

Capuchin monkeys are playful, inquisitive primates known for their manual dexterity, complex social behavior, and cognitive abilities. New research now shows that just like humans, they display a fundamental sex difference in the organization of the brain, specifically in the corpus callosum, the region that connects the two cerebral lobes. A recently published paper by Associate Professor of Psychology and Biology Kimberley A. Phillips (Hiram College), Chet C. Sherwood (George Washington University) and Alayna L. Lilak (Hiram College), reports finding both sex and handedness influences on…

One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is probably one you don’t think of very often — the capacity to learn based merely on what someone tells you. For instance, if we are told that our neighbors’ son has died his hair purple, we update our mental image of him to accommodate this newly acquired information. What is unknown, however, is when we become capable of revising our mental representations of objects or situations based solely on what someone tells us. To answer this question, Boston University psychologist Patricia Ganea and her colleagues set up a series of…

Neuroscientists at University College London and Ghent University have found the brain circuit involved in thinking twice and checking impulsive behaviour. The duo discovered that an area in the fronto-median cortex of the brain is activated when you begin to think ‘I’m not going to go through with this’ and stop yourself doing what you were about to do. According to the study, published in the ‘Journal of Neuroscience’ today, this specific brain network is involved in self-control and checks and limits our desired actions. Professor Patrick Haggard, UCL Institute of Neuroscience, said: “…

A Swedish researcher says astrococytes, the most abundant cell type in the brain, can lead to new treatment for stroke victims. Stroke is the result of an infarction, or bleeding, within the brain, and it may lead to impaired movement, impaired sensation, and difficulties in cognitive function and speech. Approximately 30,000 people are affected by stroke each year in Sweden, and it is the most common cause of long-term dependence on care. "Researchers all over the world are intensively searching for new treatments. One interesting possibility is that of activating stem cells in the damaged…

Katherine Franz, an assistant chemistry professor at Duke University, says the key to battling neurological diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases may lie in binding up iron and then separating the good from the bad. Her approach, with graduate student Louise Charkoudian, is to formulate sensitive chemical sentinels they call "pro-chelators." Those are metal-binding agents wrapped in chemical "cages" so they can enter the brain and wait in reserve until they encounter a site of potential damage. Such a site contains both iron and the molecule hydrogen peroxide. The reaction…

An out-of-body experience (OBE) occurs when a person who is awake sees themselves from a location outside their physical body. OBEs have been reported in conditions where brain function is compromised, such as stroke, epilepsy and drug abuse. They have also been reported in association with traumatic experiences such as car accidents. Around one in ten people claim to have had an OBE at some time in their lives. Now Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, a University College London neuroscientist, has devised the first experimental method to induce an out-of-body experience in healthy participants. Dr Ehrsson…

Scientists know that information travels between brain cells along hairlike extensions called axons. For the first time, researchers have found that axons don’t just transmit information – they can turn the signal up or down with the right stimulation. This finding may help scientists develop treatments for psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia in which it is thought that different parts of the brain do not communicate correctly with each other. “Until now, scientists have thought that in the brain’s cortex -- where most cognitive processes occur -- information was only…

Yes, your favorite color is blue. Most of you, anyway. Except some women, who go for the redder part of the red-green axis. A lot of science sites got a press release from Current Biology and went with the "women do prefer pink" headline without even reading the abstract much less the actual article, which is why you're smart enough to read about it here instead. In fact, if you read a story today that had "Girls prefer pink ..." somewhere in it, you can guess some journalist phoned that one in. Or they just copied the press release verbatim.(1) The idea behind this latest study was to…

Ever heard of cynical shyness? Researchers at the Shyness Research Institute in Indiana say this extreme form of shyness is behind the school shootings in the last decade. Conveniently, it predominantly affects males and can lead to violent behavior. Presenting at the 115th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologist Bernardo Carducci, PhD, and Kristin Terry Nethery, BA, examined the cases involving eight individuals between 1995 and 2004 who had committed shootings at their high schools. They examined the news accounts of these shootings for personal…