Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Executive Control Training Reduces Rumination.

  Rumination (thinking repetitively and passively about negative emotions, focusing on symptoms of distress) is a maladaptive form of self-focus that is a core... Read more

  Posted on 25 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Distinguishing the 50 United States with a Tightness-looseness Measure.

  

  Harrington and Gelfand offer a parsimonious mechanism for the striking cultural and political differences between the 50 United States by suggesting that the... Read more

  Posted on 24 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Early Music Training Enhances Cognitive Capacities in Adults.

  

  Further experiments on the profound effect that early musical training has on executive functioning in adults. The article has a useful introduction that... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• On the Precipice - a "Majority-Minority" America.

  Sigh.... another chilling vision of America's future from Craig and Richeson. Increasing polarization of groups: The U.S. Census Bureau projects that racial... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dopamine Receptor Genes and Independent Versus Interdependent Social Orientation.

  Kitayama et al. make yet another stab at finding correlates of the often cited distinction of European American (more independent) and Asians (more... Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Speed Reading Apps Blow Away Comprehension.

  Schotter et al. make a demonstration that being able to glance back during reading (not allowed under speed reading conditions) significantly enhances... Read more

  Posted on 18 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Watching the Physical Correlate of Memory Improvement During Sleep.

  

  Euston and Steenland do a perspective on nice work by Yang et al. that probes the role of sleep in altering mouse brain structures. I pass on their summary... Read more

  Posted on 17 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• When Being a Control-freak Doesn't Help....

  Bocanegra and Hommel note limits to the usefulness of cognitive control, showing, in particular, how overcontrol (induced by task instructions) can prevent the... Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Initiative Meets physics….Opps!

  Scientists leading the much-heralded Obama Brain Initiative initially providing $100 million (now NIH is seeking 4.5 billion for their part of the project) to... Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gratitude Reduces Economic Impatience.

  Whenever I come across yet another self-help laundry list of useful tricks for feeling better, and try a few, I repeatedly find that briefly following... Read more

  Posted on 12 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Childhood Bullying Predicts Adult Inflammation.

  How is this for a chilling finding? Childhood bullying leaves bullies with lower, and victims with higher, levels of chronic inflammation than those uninvolved... Read more

  Posted on 11 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Tonics for a Long Life?

  I've recently come across two articles relevant to life extension (work done with mice and worms, to be sure, but a human who reads these papers might well be... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rapidity of Human Brain and Muscle Evolution - the Downside of Smarts?

  Roberts does a summary of fascinating work by Bozak et al. He sets the context: Somewhat narcissistically, one of the spectacular changes in phenotype that we... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• First Direct Evidence for Human Sex Pheromones.

  Here is a clever experiment by Zhou et al., who digitally morph the gender of moving point light displays of walking from male to female while subjects are... Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Attention and Our Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.

  

  Ralph Adolphs points to an interesting article by Wolf et al. showing that bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage impairs visual attention to the eye... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Blue Mind - Looking at Water Improves Your Health and Calm

  I just spend three days this past weekend in a guesthouse cabin in Door County, Wisconsin - three days of seeing mainly gorgeous green forests and the blue... Read more

  Posted on 04 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Crowdsourcing Our Brain’s Wiring.

  You too can be be a neuroscientist! I have to join in the general chorus of press pointing to the efforts of Sebastian Seung, now moving from MIT to Princeton... Read more

  Posted on 03 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Science of Inequality.

  The May 23 issue of Science Magazine has a large section devoted the origins and analysis of economic inequality. And, the general gist of virtually all the... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Monkey Business Illusion.

  Many people have by now viewed the famous "Gorilla Video" made by Daniel Simons over fifteen years ago, in which most viewers asked to count how many times... Read more

  Posted on 30 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Social Equality is Represented in the Brain.

  Interesting work from Aoki, Adolphs, and collaborators: A distinct aspect of the sense of fairness in humans is that we care not only about equality in... Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE