Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Explaining the Increase in Individualism in the U.S. Over the Past 150 Years.

  Grossman and Varnum quantify shifts in eight cultural-level correlates of individualism reflected in the domains of cultural products (individualist and... Read more

  Posted on 01 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Most Clever Crow Yet....

  MindBlog has done posts on a raven making a tool, an urban crow with street smarts, and now I pass on a video that a friend alerted me to, showing a crow solvin... Read more

  Posted on 30 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Effortless Awareness: Linking Subjective Experience with Brain Activity During...

  Garrison and collaborators, whose work I have referenced in a previous post and also at the end of my "Upstairs/Downstairs" web lecture, give a further account... Read more

  Posted on 29 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Improving Vision in Older Adults.

  I'm now a Fort Lauderdale, Florida resident (except for 5 months of spring and summer in Madison WI.), and have several friends 85 and older still still... Read more

  Posted on 28 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotion is a Component of the Earliest Stages of Perception.

  

  Emotions and perceptions are generally assumed to be separate and parallel realms of the mind. Topolinski et al. show to the contrary that affect is a genuine... Read more

  Posted on 27 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Subliminal Learning Can Nudge Future Control Decisions.

  A dichotomy is proposed by most dual-system approaches to cognition (as, for example, in Kahneman's 2011 book "Thinking, fast and slow") in which processes are... Read more

  Posted on 24 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mind Wandering and Mental Autonomy.

  I'm on my third reading of a dense open access paper by Thomas Metzinger in Frontiers in Psychology titled "The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking a... Read more

  Posted on 23 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Evolution of Gender Effects on Empathy.

  

  Christov-Moore et al. offer a review making the point that differences in the capacity for empathy between males and females have deep evolutionary and... Read more

  Posted on 22 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Observing Leadership Emergence Through Interpersonal Brain Synchronization.

  Interesting work from Jiang et al., who show that show that interpersonal neural synchronization is significantly higher between leaders and followers than... Read more

  Posted on 21 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Glycogen Recovery After Exercise: Junk Food as Good as Sport Supplements

  I note this article because one of its authors, Chuck Dumke, now at the University of Montana, worked in my vision research laboratory at the University of... Read more

  Posted on 20 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Your Friends Know How Long You Will Live.

  An interesting study from Jackson et al. analyzing data from an east coast cohort of 600 people observed in the 1930s through 2013: Although self-rated... Read more

  Posted on 17 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Positive and Negative Emotions - Valence is Not Value

  Having done several recent posts on positive emotions, and given the continuing rise of the "Be Happy" industry with its Be Happy Apps, I thought it... Read more

  Posted on 16 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Happens in Vagus - Compassion, Positive Emotion, Vagal Tone, and Respirator...

  The 10th cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, is distinctive to mammals and supports social engagement and nurturing behaviors as well as feeding, digesting, resting... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Science of Mind Wandering.

  

  I want to pass on this reference to an Ann. Rev. of Psychology article by Smallwood and Schooler, an extensive review and description of mind wandering, its... Read more

  Posted on 14 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Manipulating Moral Decisions by Exploiting Eye Gaze.

  

  Here is a fascinating piece of work from Pärnamets et al.: Eye gaze is a window onto cognitive processing in tasks such as spatial memory, linguistic processing... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The iWatch Will Be Making Us More Sociable and Human??

  I enjoy techie stuff (with the recent exception of taking too many hours to figure out wireless network problems that caused my Zeppelin AirPlay speaker to... Read more

  Posted on 10 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Drug for Compassion?

  

  Sáez et al. enhance human egalitarian behavior in humans with tolcapone - a drug approved for use with Parkinson's disease patients - which prolongs the... Read more

  Posted on 09 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Natural Compound for Chilling Out?

  

  As I sit here typing this morning, I'm munching on cocoa nibs, inspired by Friedman's review pointing to the work of Dincheva et al. Read more

  Posted on 08 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Physical Activity's 'modest' Effects on Cognitive Vitality

  Prakash et al., in the Annual Review of Psychology, have reviewed the epidemiological literature on physical activity and exercise and their relationship to... Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Awareness Breaks Down Brain’s Network Modularity.

  Godwin et al. provide an analysis showing that awareness emerges from global changes in the brain’s functional connectivity: Neurobiological theories of... Read more

  Posted on 03 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE