Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• A New Study on Implicit Attitudes and Voting..

  Following my post on implicit attitudes and voting I have received an email from a group of collaborators doing further studies on the same issue. Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gender Bias is Alive and Well in Academic Science.

  Handelsman and collaborators do a rather clear study on how the academy works, showing that science faculties favor male students: Despite efforts to recruit an... Read more

  Posted on 26 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Resilience to Stress Replacing Happiness as Fashionable Research Topic

  Nature has published a special supplement on Stress and Relilience, a topic also of major emphasis in Richard Davidson's new book. Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mechanism of Unconscious Internal Bias in Our Choices

  

  What's actually happening when we make choices that do not seem to be justifiable on purely economic or logical grounds? Wimmer and Shohamy do some interesting... Read more

  Posted on 24 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Learning New Information During Sleep.

  Arzi et al. do an ingenious experiment to show that we can do associative learning during our sleep. We can associate a sound with a pleasant or unpleasant... Read more

  Posted on 19 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Neurochemistry of Storytelling.

  Having in the previous post just made an ill-tempered dump on one kind of popularization, I decide to be inconsistent and now pass on this nice piece with a... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Showbiz...

  Put me down as a curmudgeonly old fart, but I'm not getting a 'gee whiz' response to a recent promotional email asking for publicity on a rhythm and the brain... Read more

  Posted on 17 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Clever Crows! Now Shown to Reason About Hidden Causes.

  Behavioral studies on New Caledonian crows, especially over the past twenty years, continue to yield amazing results. (A video I first posted for my Biology of... Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Opps! Sex Does Decrease Human Male Lifespan.

  Animal studies have suggested that castration increases lifespan in males, and now Korean researchers have examined genealogy records and lifespan of 81 Korean... Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2012 SCIENCE

• Followup on Evolutionary Psychology as ' Just So Stories'

  A comment on my Sept. 28 post has passed on a number of excellent response to the book review I was noting in that post. I was remiss (lazy) in not taking to... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Young Children and Adults: Intrinsically Motivated to See Others Helped

  This interesting piece from Tomasello and collaborators: Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, we found that... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MRI of Reading Jane Austen

  Another totally annoying example of science by press release sans any reference to an original research article offers a glimpse at what looks like fascinating... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2012 BOOKS, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rethinking Sleep - Brief Wakeful Resting Boosts New Memories Over the Long Term.

  Two recent articles point out that the prevailing notion that an eight hour chunk of sleep is required for optimum health and function is a relatively recent... Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Regulators of Prosocial and Empathetic Behavior.

  Two pieces in the September issue of Psychological Science deal with empathetic or prosocial behavior. Grant and Dutton make observations showing that... Read more

  Posted on 04 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Idle Minds - Why Are Our Brains So Active When Doing ‘nothing’?

  Kerri Smith does a review on the resting or default activity of our brains, what is happening when we are not focused on anything in particular, but letting... Read more

  Posted on 03 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Interpersonal Closeness and Brain Social Reward Processing

  

  I'm passing on a graphic from Vrticka's comments on recent work by Farei et al., who have observed brain activation patterns associated with sharing positive... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Want to Be Unhappy? Trying to Be Happy Will Do It!

  

  I'm finding the "Anxiety" topic in the Opinionator series at the NYTimes to be a real treat. This entry by British expatriate Ruth Whippman brings back... Read more

  Posted on 01 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Just So Stories About the Evolution of Our Minds.

  I want to point to a very nicely done review in The New Yorker by Anthony Gottlieb, who notes a number of recent books dealing with evolutionary psychology,... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Voting Patterns: “I” Value Competence but “we” Value Social Competence

  (Chen et al. ask whether judgments of candidates' social competence—defined as the capacity for effective functioning in social interactions—are related to... Read more

  Posted on 27 September 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Combat Stress Causes Long Term Changes in Brain Connectivity.

  

  Sobering results from Wingen et al.: Prolonged stress can have long-lasting effects on cognition. Animal models suggest that deficits in executive functioning... Read more

  Posted on 26 September 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE