دردشة الاسمر شات الاسمر موقع الاسمر اكبر تحمع فلسطيني

What’s your earliest memory? If you’re an adult, it’s unlikely to be from before you were three and half to four years old. So what happens to your memories from before that age? It’s not that you never had any: two and three-year-olds gladly talk about events from over a year ago, suggesting these earlier events were once encoded in verbally-accessible long-term memory. Carole Peterson and colleagues at the Memorial  [ Read More ]

It’s not the content of the persistent, unwanted thoughts experienced by sufferers of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) that is particularly abnormal, it is their interpretation of these thoughts. Now Sue Ferrier and Chris Brewin have shed new light on what’s different about the way people with OCD interpret their thoughts. “Cognitive therapy may have in some cases to address deep-rooted beliefs about the self…” First they found OCD sufferers, more  [ Read More ]

The idea that the two hemispheres of the brain are specialised for different tasks was popularised in the 1940s by experiments with split-brain patients, in whom the nerve fibres connecting their cerebral hemispheres had been severed. But when healthy people with fully intact brains are tested, evidence for hemispheric specialisation is often not found. Now Christine Mohr and her colleagues have tested the idea that this is because hemispheric specialisation  [ Read More ]

Two years before the recent London bombings, Robin Goodwin and colleagues surveyed 100 employees at the British Library in London, and 240 students in London and Oxford, to see if there was a relationship between what they valued in life and how threatened they felt by terrorism. People who placed more importance on enjoying their life were more fearful of being personally at risk of an attack. Somewhat paradoxically, people  [ Read More ]

The similar way we react to a joke and to being tickled has led some, including Darwin, to suggest that our emotional experience of each is the same: that tickle is a ‘physical joke’. Now for the first time, psychologists have studied people’s emotional reaction to tickling and compared it with their reaction to joke-induced humour and to pain. Eighty-four participants’ faces were filmed while their sides were tickled from  [ Read More ]

If I asked you to predict how you’d react emotionally to a given situation – say your train to work was cancelled, or if your football team were to win next Saturday – then research suggests you would overestimate its emotional effect on you. That’s because in using our past experiences as a guide to how we’ll feel in future situations, it is our most extreme experiences that most readily  [ Read More ]

People apparently find it harder to imagine battle scenes from World War II than from the Middle Ages, probably because of their exposure to authentic footage of the Second World War, which is often poor quality. And the less able someone is to imagine World War II scenes vividly, the more likely they are to deny Nazi cruelty. That’s according to Eric Rassin and colleagues who asked students to imagine  [ Read More ]

Women who are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, or who are looking for a short-term relationship, tend to prefer taller men. That’s according to Polish researchers Boguslaw Pawlowski and Grazyna Jasienska who asked 110 women to look at drawings of six male-female couples and say which they thought was the ‘best match’. The illustrated couples varied in the height difference between the man and woman. The man  [ Read More ]

Here’s a dieting technique you may not have come across before. Psychologists at the University of Washington misled people into believing they had been made ill by strawberry ice cream as a child, thus leaving them less willing to eat strawberry ice cream now. Daniel Bernstein and colleagues gave hundreds of undergrad students six questionnaires to fill in about their food preferences, lifetime food experiences and their eating behaviour at  [ Read More ]

Some people are predisposed to fearing those whose skin colour is different from their own, in much the same way they are predisposed to fearing snakes and spiders. Andreas Olsson and colleagues presented participants with two photos, one of a black male face and one of a white male face. When either the black or the white face was consistently presented at the same time as a mild electric shock,  [ Read More ]