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Meditation can reduce heart rate, lower blood pressure and improve mental health, thus relieving the harmful effects of stress. But does it matter whether the meditation is spiritual in nature or not? A study by Amy Wachholtz and Kenneth Pargament at Bowling Green State University suggests it does. They trained 25 student participants in spiritual meditation and 21 participants in secular meditation. The two groups received identical training except that [ Read More ]
Given the right support from their teacher, five to six-year-old children who are struggling at school can be prevented from falling further behind year on year. Whereas most previous research has tended to focus on class size and teacher-to-pupil ratios, Bridget Hamre and Robert Pianta (University of Virginia) looked at the effect of teaching style and emotional support. Among 910 children at 747 schools, the researchers identified those at risk [ Read More ]
As part of the normal ageing process, some older people show an impairment in their ability to ignore information that is irrelevant to the task at hand, but their ability to enhance processing of relative stimuli remains intact. Adam Gazzaley (pictured) at the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues presented 17 healthy younger participants (aged 19 to 30) and 16 healthy older participants (aged 60 to 77 years) with alternating [ Read More ]
Not only can cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) provide sufferers of schizophrenia with additional benefits above and beyond those gained from taking anti-psychotic medication, but some of these benefits continue to persist two years later. Furthermore, the extra expense of providing cognitive behavioural therapy to these patients is offset by money saved from the patients spending less time in hospital. Mike Startup (University of Newcastle, Australia) and colleagues at the University [ Read More ]
Normally we have a slight bias to the left-hand side of space. So if we’re asked to mark the centre of a line, for example, we tend to overestimate the length of the left-hand portion. Now Tom Manly (pictured) at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and colleagues have shown that as we grow tired this bias is shifted over to the right-hand side. The finding could [ Read More ]
The late Mary Whitehouse, famed campaigner for traditional morals and decency, would have approved of this new study by Brad Bushman at the University of Michigan showing that adverts embedded in violent and/or sexual TV programmes are less effective than adverts embedded in more family-oriented entertainment. Bushman asked 336 adult volunteers aged between 18 and 54 to watch either a violent programme like ‘24’, starring Keifer Sutherland; a sexy programme [ Read More ]
The UK law introduced in 2003 banning the use of handheld mobile phones while driving presupposes that it’s the handling aspect of mobile use that’s dangerous rather than the communication aspect. Now a study by psychologists at the University of Illinois has added to the evidence showing that hands-free phones could be dangerous too. “…it’s the cognitive demands associated with communication via wireless phones, rather than use of the phone [ Read More ]
Increasingly, employers in the UK are using cognitive ability tests to help them recruit the best candidates. Now Cristina Bertua and colleagues have performed the first ever meta-analysis of UK research looking at how accurately these tests predict candidate employees’ subsequent work and training performance once they’ve got the job. Meta-analysis is a technique used for combining the results of multiple studies. From a search of the literature dating from [ Read More ]
A study investigating the link between student finances and health has found British students have more debt, more financial worries and poorer health than their Finnish counterparts (despite the countries having similar health standards overall according to WHO figures). In Britain, student tuition fees have been introduced and maintenance grants abolished. In Finland, by contrast, there are no tuition fees, and students receive grants and housing benefit. The study found [ Read More ]
Watch any dog sniffing its way down the street and it’s obvious they’re expert at localising smells. They seem to know which direction a smell is coming from, much as we do with sounds and, of course, sights. We can certainly tell where a smell is by moving nearer or further from it. But once a smell reaches our nostrils, it’s not at all clear whether or not we can [ Read More ]