Many turn to tea as an afternoon break in the day. But could drinking the plain, old fashioned variety — black tea — actually send stress packing? Find out here.
Archive for أكتوبر, 2006
Pick two people off the street at random, put them in a brain scanner, and look at the thickness of their corpus callosums – that’s the massive bundle of nerve fibres that connects the two halves of the brain. In all likelihood, you’ll find it’s much thicker in one person than the other. Indeed, some people can have up to three times as many nerve fibres in their corpus callosum [ Read More ]
How do the public view mental disorders? Do they see them as real entities with some kind of essence, or do they see them as the invention of human culture? And how does their take differ from that of mental health professionals? To find out, Woo-kyoung Ahn and colleagues asked 30 university undergrads and 30 experts to answer questions about the nature of a selection of familiar and unfamiliar psychiatric [ Read More ]
You sacrificed your Saturday afternoon, you faced the high-street crowds, but after unwrapping the present you so generously bought for them, they didn’t even say thank you. According to Catherine Roster of the University of New Mexico, when it comes to the future of your relationship with them, that’s the worst thing an unhappy gift recipient can do. Roster interviewed 186 people who were able to recall a recent occasion [ Read More ]
“‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusion of wit and humour are to be conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” From Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen. The more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the better they perform on [ Read More ]
Following a traumatic experience, people often have a persistent, yet strangely incomplete, memory for what happened to them. One explanation is that in times of hyper-arousal, such as during trauma, our attention becomes extremely focused on the most relevant details of what’s happening, thus impairing our memory for more peripheral aspects. To test this idea, Tamara Cavenett and Reginald Nixon recruited a group of 70 skydivers. Half of them learned [ Read More ]
People in countries with a large gap between the rich and poor have short life expectancies, not because of the economic inequality and lack of resources, but rather because they are unintelligent. That’s the controversial claim of Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, who has used data from the UN and World Bank to look at the associations between average life expectancy, prosperity and economic inequality within over [ Read More ]
For when you’ve had enough of reading journal articles: The sleeping pill that is awakening coma patients. The lady who changed her husband’s behaviour using animal training techniques (free registration required). Does neuroscience hold the key to the placebo effect? What happened when the psychiatrist went for psychoanalysis?
Eye-catching studies that didn’t make the final cut this fortnight: The role of auditory ‘mirror neurons’ in human empathy. In monkeys, these cells are activated both when a certain action is performed and when the sound of that action is heard. Counsellors need to find ways to get clients to talk about difficult experiences they’ve had with therapy. How the presence of an audience changes participants’ brain response to stories [ Read More ]
Childhood development disorders. (Nature Neuroscience). Judgment and decision-making in sport and exercise. (Psychology of Sport and Exercise). Race, ethnicity and culture in child development. (Child Development). Integration of cognitive assessment and response to intervention – Part II. (Psychology in the Schools). Music and the brain. (Brain). Malingering. (Behavioural Sciences and the Law). Chronic pain. (Journal of Clinical Psychology). Modelling the mind. (Science). If you’re aware of a forthcoming journal special [ Read More ]