Social Sciences

New research findings now appearing online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology began with a professor's desire to understand why her husband often seemed to ignore her requests for help around the house. "My husband, while very charming in many ways, has an annoying tendency of doing exactly the opposite of what I would like him to do in many situations," said Tanya L. Chartrand, an associate professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. When Chartrand envisioned a formal academic study of people's resistance to the wishes of their partners…

Although no two brains are alike, they can display a comparable pattern of neural activity when exposed to similar sensory input. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen have now developed a mathematical method to design networks from neural cells which exhibit a predefined pattern dynamics. The researchers hope that their method will assist them in getting closer to understanding which of the possible network configurations was privileged by evolution -- and why (Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, December, 2006). Different neuronal networks can…

In side-by-side taste tests, pub-goers agree: “MIT Brew” tastes better than Budweiser — as long as tasters don’t learn beforehand that the secret ingredient is balsamic vinegar. It sounds more like a fraternity prank than a psychology experiment, but the beer-guzzling participants in a recent study were doing their part for psychology. In this case, helping researchers determine just what it is about consumers’ knowledge of food products that af-fects their taste judgments. Does Knowledge Of Food Products Affect Taste Judgment? Leonard Lee, Columbia Business School, Shane Frederick, MIT,…

Every day we plan numerous actions, such as to return a book to a friend or to make an appointment. How and where the brain stores these intentions has been revealed by John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in cooperation with researchers from London and Tokyo. For the first time they were able to "read" participants' intentions out of their brain activity. This was made possible by a new combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and sophisticated computer algorithms (Current Biology, 20th February 2007, online: 8th February).…

People’s long-term satisfaction with their lives often parallels that of their spouse, says a University of Toronto researcher in a study that deals a blow to theories that individual happiness depends mainly on genetic disposition. Ulrich Schimmack of the University of Toronto at Mississauga’s psychology department and Richard Lucas of the University of Michigan studied the similarity in life satisfaction of more than 800 German married couples. They found that individuals’ reports of increased or decreased life satisfaction closely matched those of their spouses over a period of 21 years.…

Video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision. Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics. In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart. Perhaps Daphne Bavelier and Shawn Green will work on reasons to skip school and eat Fritos next. (…

A novel experiment conducted by Carnegie Mellon University Professor George Loewenstein and colleagues may explain why people try a drug, such as heroin, for the first time despite ample evidence that it is addictive. The results of the study, which are being published in the Journal of Health Economics, reveal that even longtime addicts underestimate the influence that drug cravings have over their behavior. Almost all drugs produce a craving in their users. Loewenstein and his colleagues hypothesized that people experiment with drugs that they know are addictive in part because they…

Fluctuations in sex hormone levels during women's menstrual cycles affect the responsiveness of their brains' reward circuitry, an imaging study at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has revealed. While women were winning rewards, their circuitry was more active if they were in a menstrual phase preceding ovulation and dominated by estrogen, compared to a phase when estrogen and progesterone are present. Brain activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (yellow), part of the brain's reward system, was increased during women's pre…

Tricking a key enzyme can soothe over-excited receptors in the brain, say neuroscientists, calling this a possible strategy against stroke, Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. Lead author Michel Baudry of the University of Southern California, his graduate student Wei Xu and collaborators from the University of British Columbia outline their technique in the Feb. 1 issue of Neuron. The researchers injected laboratory mice with a decoy peptide containing a snippet of a receptor that facilitates cell death in neurodegenerative diseases. They hoped the toxic enzyme calpain would…

What influence does the variation in estrogen level have on the activation of the female brain? Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Jean-Claude Dreher, a researcher at the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (CNRS/Université Lyon 1), in collaboration with an American team from the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland) directed by Karen Berman, has identified, for the first time, the neural networks involved in processing reward-related functions modulated by female gonadal steroid hormones. This result, which was published online on January 29, 2007 on the PNAS website…