“The !Kung of Africa swap arrows before going hunting, and when an animal is killed, the credit does not go to the person who fired the arrow, but to the person whom the arrow belongs to. If a person becomes … Continue reading
“Both long-term practitioners and new meditators – when compared to non-meditators – showed reduced activity in the amygdala when they viewed emotionally-positive images. The amygdala is an area of the brain critical for emotion and detecting important information from the … Continue reading
“What we’re finding is that after 10 years or so there are still markers, like fossils in our genome, telling us there was a trauma here. And that trauma may make this individual more susceptible to a second trauma or, … Continue reading
What these psychedelics do above all, is give access to other states of consciousness that are dormant within our own minds. It’s the exploration of human consciousness. It isn’t really the drug effect as such. Why are we so afraid … Continue reading
“Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten: The Narrative Collective Assimilation Hypothesis,” published in the current issue journal Psychological Science, presents research supporting the authors’ hypothesis that by absorbing narratives, we can psychologically become a member of the group of characters described … Continue reading
The researchers found that people remember information better if it is presented to them in a virtual environment. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Virtual Reality. […] The key, say the researchers, was for participants … Continue reading
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to theresearchers. “People who have greater levels of mindfulness — or the tendency to maintain attention on and awareness of the present moment — are better able to cope with the pain of being … Continue reading
“Andrew King from the Royal Veterinary College found that it falls apart, but only in certain circumstances. At his university open day, he asked 82 people to guess the number of sweets in a jar. If they made their guesses … Continue reading
“This summer, Christiansen organized a symposium at a language acquisition conference in Montreal where evidence showed that some systematic sound-to-meaning correspondences do exist. For instance, toddlers consistently matched rounded vowels, such as “koko,” to rounded shapes and non-rounded vowels, such … Continue reading
“The study, published in the August issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, shows that people who do not conform are most likely to work together for the greater good, while conforming to social norms can actually make people … Continue reading
“Perceived closeness that preserves the distinctness of each partner enhances intimate relationship quality, whereas pseudocloseness or enmeshment—reflecting an inability to distinguish one’s own thoughts and emotions from a partner’s—may have more negative outcomes (R. J. Green & P. D. Werner, … Continue reading
“Three articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. These findings, interpreted as evidence of implicit egotism, … Continue reading
“The body is a carrier of relatively complex cultural values. Three experiments examined links between body comportment and honor (a cultural syndrome prizing female chastity, familial loyalty, and reputation). We put participants from nonhonor (Anglo-Americans; Experiment 1) and honor (Latinos; … Continue reading
“Both ongoing practice and the theory of interaction ritual chains imply the significance of the contribution that ritual makes to group solidarity, such as national identification. This contribution is in need of empirical examination as in this study, which surveyed … Continue reading
“Interpreting ambiguous situations is a task individuals face on a daily basis. In romantic contexts the accurate interpretation of these situations is of particular importance. In the present set of studies we investigated how level of construal guides individual perception … Continue reading
“Recent studies showed that people evaluate objects more favorably when these objects are gazed-at by others, an effect coined as “mimetic desire”. In two studies, we tested whether mimetic desire stems from an automatic form of learning by examining one dimension … Continue reading
“The recordings, taken from the brains of people awaiting surgery for epilepsy, suggest that new memories of even abstract facts — an Italian verb, for example — are encoded in a brain-cell firing sequence that also contains information about what … Continue reading
“Military doctors have added a new technique to their arsenal of treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Neurofeedback, a therapy that practitioners claim can reboot the brain’s neural networks, has been introduced at several bases, VA clinics and even in … Continue reading
“Abstract Four studies investigate whether decisions for others produce more creative solutions than do decisions for the self and if construal level explains this relation. In Study 1, participants carried out a structured imagination task by drawing an alien for … Continue reading
