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Archive for أغسطس, 2006
A sedative drug that interferes with memory also has the contrasting effect of enhancing intuition – the ability to use one’s ‘gut feelings’ – according to researchers at the Universities of Arizona and Colorado. Michael Frank and colleagues tested the ability of 23 participants to learn the relative value of different abstract symbols. The participants learned through trial and error which of two symbols was the more valuable, one pair [ Read More ]
Doctors face a fundamental hurdle when seeking to reassure patients with medically-unexplained symptoms that they are physically well. Apparently such patients have a problem remembering information about how likely it is that they or other people have certain illnesses. Winfried Rief and colleagues played 33 patients with medically-unexplained symptoms a tape-recording of a doctor’s report on a patient with abdominal pain. In his report, the doctor rules out certain illnesses [ Read More ]
Writing down how you feel about your romantic relationship could help it last longer. That’s according to Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. They recruited 86 heterosexual undergrads and asked half of them to spend 20 minutes a day for three consecutive days writing about “…their deepest thoughts and feelings about their current relationship”. The other half of the undergrads were asked to spend [ Read More ]
You’re a company boss and you want to reduce illegitimate sickness leave among your employees. What do you do? Introduce schemes to increase job satisfaction among your staff? It sounds sensible – the problem is, time and again research has only found a weak link between measures of job satisfaction and employee sick leave. The same is true for measures of job involvement and organisational commitment. But now Jurgen Wegge [ Read More ]
Just as we’re better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves. Pascal Thibault and colleagues at the University of Quebec at Montreal think this has to do with motivation. We identify more with people in the same group as us – that in turn leads us to be [ Read More ]
American soldiers deployed in the recent Iraq war have returned confused, with impaired concentration, and a reduced ability to remember new information. But they’ve also come back with speeded reflexes and heightened behavioural reactivity, presumably a consequence of their prolonged exposure to life-threatening situations. That’s according to Jennifer Vasterling and colleagues, who administered a raft of neuropsychological tests to 654 soldiers before and after they were deployed to Operation Iraqi [ Read More ]
Other interesting papers that didn’t make the final cut this fortnight: Adults with autistic spectrum disorder have reduced grey matter in the area of the brain thought to contain mirror neurons – brain cells that are active both when someone performs an action, and when they see that action performed by someone else. Open access. A neuropsychological test for finding out whether someone is faking a memory problem (after head [ Read More ]
Probabilistic models of cognition. (Trends in Cognitive Sciences). Action perspectives in clinical psychology. Action theory is the notion that individuals affect the environment around them. (Journal of Clinical Psychology). Where does the law stand on the issue of delusions?: An international perspective. (Behavioural Sciences and the Law). If you’re aware of a forthcoming psychology journal special issue, please let me know.
There always seems to be a story in the news about the latest findings showing this or that brain area is activated when someone’s jealous, embarrassed or solving a crossword. But activated relative to what resting baseline? After all, unless you’re testing a group of Buddhist monks, it’s probably unrealistic to expect participants to think of absolutely nothing as they lie in the brain scanner. Now Martin Wiesmann and colleagues [ Read More ]