Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Neural Correlates of the Positive Effects of Gratitude.

  Fox offers a review noting studies showing that gratitude activates area of the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain associated with understanding other... Read more

  Posted on 16 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Exposure to and Recall of Violence Reduce Short-term Memory and Cognitive Control

  From Bogliacino et al.: Significance Research on violence has mainly focused on its consequences on individuals’ health and behavior. Read more

  Posted on 15 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Leisure Just as Enjoyable Before as After Work is Done.

  From O'Brien and Roney: Four studies reveal that (a) people hold a robust intuition about the order of work and leisure and that (b) this intuition is... Read more

  Posted on 14 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Perception of Being Overweight Predicts Future Health and Well-being

  An interesting bit from Daly et al.: Identifying oneself as being overweight may be associated with adverse health outcomes, yet prospective tests of this... Read more

  Posted on 11 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• In Group Favoritism Shown by 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 political climate. Read more

  Posted on 10 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Redistribution is Supported by Compassion, Envy, and Self Interest, but Not Sens...

  A huge collaboration looks at support for redistribution of wealth from an evolutionary psychology perspective: Significance Markets have lifted millions out... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Smiles for Love, Sympathy, and War.

  

  From Rychlowska et al.: A smile is the most frequent facial expression, but not all smiles are equal. A social-functional account holds that smiles of reward,... Read more

  Posted on 08 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students That Words Are Violence

  A piece by Haidt and Lukianoff contesting several points made by Lisa Friedman in a much discussed NYTimes Grey Matter essay is worth a read. Read more

  Posted on 07 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Positive Mood from Listening to Music Broadens Our Auditory Attention.

  An addition to the literature from Putkinen et al. expanding on previous findings that positive mood broadens visual attention: Previous studies indicate that... Read more

  Posted on 04 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Default Mode Network and the Wandering Mind.

  The respective roles of attentional and default mode networks in our brains has been the subject of numerous MindBlog posts (enter 'default mode' in the search... Read more

  Posted on 03 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence

  I want to pass on some clips from a very cogent article by Kai-Fu Lee (chairman and chief executive of Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm, and the... Read more

  Posted on 02 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Buying Time Promotes Happiness.

  A nice piece from Whillans et al.: Significance Despite rising incomes, people around the world are feeling increasingly pressed for time, undermining... Read more

  Posted on 01 August 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive Reappraisal in Frontal Cortex Underlies Placebo Analgesia.

  Interesting work from van der Meulen et al.: Placebo analgesia (PA) depends crucially on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is assumed to be responsible for... Read more

  Posted on 31 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Different Languages Use Different Systems of Nerve Cells.

  From Xu et al.: A large body of previous neuroimaging studies suggests that multiple languages are processed and organized in a single neuroanatomical system... Read more

  Posted on 28 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The World’s Laziest Countries.

  From Althoff et al.: To be able to curb the global pandemic of physical inactivity and the associated 5.3 million deaths per year, we need to understand the... Read more

  Posted on 27 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Brain Circuits of a Winner.

  Social dominance in mice depends on winning social contests. Zhou et al. manipulate synapses connecting the thalamus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex to show... Read more

  Posted on 26 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• When is Stress Good for You?

  I want to point to an interesting essay by Bruce McEwen, a well known Rockefeller Univ. researcher who has studied mechanisms of stress for many years. Read more

  Posted on 25 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks.

  From Brady et al.: Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to... Read more

  Posted on 24 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rejuvenating Brain Plasticity

  Blundon et al. have demonstrated that several pharmacological interventions that disrupt A1-adenosine receptor signalling can restore the brain's cortical... Read more

  Posted on 21 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A.I. Algorithms Analyze the Mood of the Masses.

  I pass on this brief article by Matthew Hutson: With billions of users and hundreds of billions of tweets and posts every year, social media has brought big dat... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE