Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Kitty See, Kitty Do: Cat Imitates Human

  

  I am immediately going to start trying this with my abyssinians! Cats have been notoriously hard to study, and this study reinforces, for example, that cats 0... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Perceptions of Family Social Status Correlate with Health and Life Chances

  A fascinating British twin study from Rivenbark et al: Children from lower-income households are at increased risk for poor health, educational failure, and... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Genes and Environments, Development and Time

  A special section of the Sept. 22 issue of PNAS offers a series of free online artices on biological embedding across timescales. Here is the abstract of the... Read more

  Posted on 24 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Inflammaging - Another Reason Seniors Don't Want to Catch COVID-19

  I imagine myself to have a very robust immune system because I very seldom catch a flu or cold, take Vitamins C and D, exercise, am not overweight, ran around... Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The 2020 Ig Nobel Prizes - Research on Knives Made of Feces.

  A piece in Science Magazine gives the highlights of this year's Ig Noble prize s published in the Annals of Improbable Research. Read more

  Posted on 22 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Circuits Signaling the Absence of Emotion in Body Language

  Sokolov et al. show that modulation of the reciprocal effective connectivity between the amygdala and insula during processing of neutral and emotional body... Read more

  Posted on 21 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Another Big History - Why the West is WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized,...

  Alas, I usually end up reading reviews of books rather than the books themselves. Here I want to pass on clips from Shulevitz's review in The Atlantic: of Josep... Read more

  Posted on 18 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ethnic Antagonism Erodes Republicans’ Commitment to Democracy

  Bartels does a survey (open source) that provides numbers and graphs on what is obvious from current news sources - the frailty of public commitment to... Read more

  Posted on 16 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Disagreeable People Are Not More Likely Than Agreeable People to Obtain Power...

  An interesting study from Anderson et al.: Does being disagreeable—that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways—help people attain power? Read more

  Posted on 15 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• "Us" Versus "Them" in 17 Month Old Infants.

  Jin and Baillargeon make observations that suggest an early origin of the 'us and them' perspective being taken to extremes in our current polarized political... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive Control Increases Honesty in Cheaters but Cheating in Those Who Are...

  Abe discusses work of Speer et al. that probes: ..a long-standing paradox concerning the cognitive nature of honesty: Is it a matter of “will” or “grace”? Read more

  Posted on 10 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Origins of Human Music - Two Perspectives

  Because I wrote an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (coauthored with Vadim Arshavsky), that was published in 2010, I receive the journal's calls for... Read more

  Posted on 09 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Science of Inequality.

  Economic inequality is a continuing focus of political debate, and I think a re-post of a brief MindBlog item from 6/2/2014 is relevant: The May 23 issue of... Read more

  Posted on 08 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Predicting Results of Our Presidential Election.

  I want to pass on an email from retired historian Lou Wangberg, a friend from my Fort Lauderdale period who leads a history discussion group there. He gives... Read more

  Posted on 07 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Democracy in the Balance - Special Issue of Science Magazine

  The Sept.4 issue of Science Magazine has a special section of open source perspectives and reviews. A few of the titles: Racial authoritarianism in U.S. Read more

  Posted on 04 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Illusion of Objectivity Enhances Political Polarization.

  From Schwalbe et al. (open source): Significance Political polarization increasingly threatens democratic institutions. The belief that “my side” sees the... Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mechanisms of Our Current Political Polarization.

  I want to point to three sources that provide complimentary perspectives on the origins and maintenance of the extreme Red versus Blue divide in the U.S. Read more

  Posted on 02 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Active Grandparent Hypothesis - an Evolutionary Explanation of Why and How...

  I recommend that you read an interesting article by Daniel Lieberman in the current issue of Harvard Magazine. Here are a few clips: The evidence that... Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Changes as MindBlog's Autonomic Nervous System Ages 11 Years

  

  Actually, the original title of this MindBlog post on June 11, 2013 was "Changes as an autonomic nervous system ages 11 years - The "Wild Divine" is a bit less... Read more

  Posted on 31 August 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reconsidering the Value of Believing in Free Will.

  Nadelhoffer et al. fail to replicate 2008 experiments suggesting that a belief in determinish increases cheating: A key source of support for the view that... Read more

  Posted on 28 August 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE