Optimists Are Better at Regulating Stress
MONTREAL; July 23, 2013—It’s no surprise that those who tend to see a rose’s blooms before its thorns are also better at handling stress. But science has failed to reliably associate optimism with individuals’ biological stress response—until now.
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Emotions Are Us
July 22, 2013—For most of modern history, scientists have turned a cold shoulder toward the study of emotion. At best it has been viewed as a mechanism to alert us to modify behavior. Fear might prompt us to escape from the presence of a threat; anger might galvanize us to mount a defense against enemies; empathy might be handy for motivating us to help others and ensure the continuity of the human race. But otherwise, like our vulcan friend from Star Trek, many have felt emotion to be a primitive obstruction to the real work of the brain—the archenemy of logical thinking. A serious cognitive scientist wouldn’t study it; a serious article wouldn’t address it. To be concerned with the question of emotion was considered a fluffy, touchy-feely, trivial pursuit. Then came the1960s and ’70s, when a number of fledgling scientists arose who wondered whether it was possible to understand cognition without also considering emotion.
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The Love Hormone is Two-Faced
CHICAGO; July 22, 2013—It turns out the love hormone oxytocin is two-faced. Oxytocin has long been known as the warm, fuzzy hormone that promotes feelings of love, social bonding and well-being. It's even being tested as an anti-anxiety drug. But new Northwestern Medicine® research shows oxytocin also can cause emotional pain, an entirely new, darker identity for the hormone.
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"Big Givers" Get Punished for Being Nonconformists, Baylor Research Shows
WACO, TX; June 27, 2013—People punish generous group members by rejecting them socially—even when the generosity benefits everyone—because the "big givers" are nonconformists, according to a Baylor University study.
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Researchers Identify Emotions Based on Brain Activity
PITTSBURGH; June 19, 2013—For the first time, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have identified which emotion a person is experiencing based on brain activity.
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What Do Memories Look Like?
June 19, 2013—Oscar Wilde called memory "the diary that we all carry about with us." Now a team of scientists has developed a way to see where and how that diary is written.
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People Are Overly Confident in Their Own Knowledge, Despite Errors
APS; June 10, 2013—Overprecision—excessive confidence in the accuracy of our beliefs—can have profound consequences, inflating investors’ valuation of their investments, leading physicians to gravitate too quickly to a diagnosis, even making people intolerant of dissenting views. Now, new research confirms that overprecision is a common and robust form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments.
The research, conducted by researchers Albert Mannes of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Don Moore of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted their estimates in response to feedback about their accuracy and to the costs of being wrong.
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Study Says Ask for a Precise Number During Negotiations
NEW YORK; May 31, 2013—With so much on the line for job seekers in this difficult economic climate, a lot of new hires might be wondering how—or whether at all—to negotiate salary when offered a new position. A recently published study on the art of negotiation by two professors at Columbia Business School could help these new hires, and all negotiators, seal a stronger deal than before.
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Empathy Plays a Role in Resolving Classic Ethical Dilemmas
CHESTNUT HILL, MA; May 22, 2013—Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Those who tend to say "yes" when faced with this classic dilemma are likely to be deficient in a specific kind of empathy, according to a report published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
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Bach to the Blues: Our Emotions Match Music to Colors
Berkeley, CA; May 16, 2013—Whether we’re listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, Mozart’s jaunty Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often associated with bright yellow and orange, whereas his dour Requiem in D minor is more likely to be linked to dark, bluish gray.
Moreover, people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors. This suggests that humans share a common emotional palette—when it comes to music and color—that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers, UC Berkeley researchers said.
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Take an Empathy Pill and Call Me in the Morning
April 17, 2013—The Oxford Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” although an important dimension seems to be missing in this simple statement. I prefer the definition given by science writer Maia Szalavitz and child psychiatrist Bruce Perry in their 2010 book, Born for Love. “The essence of empathy,” they write, “is the ability to stand in another’s shoes, to feel what it’s like there and to care about making it better if it hurts.”
This is an ability that we can’t exercise if we lack emotional literacy, which social entrepreneur Mary Gordon explains as “the language of the heart.” The founder of an evidence-based and internationally-acclaimed program called “Roots of Empathy,” Gordon points out that children need help putting their emotions into words and learning to understand them and cope with them while also expressing them in appropriate ways. Together with empathy, she says, emotional literacy forms the foundation of morally responsible behavior.
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Our Future Looks Bright Because We Reject the Possibility of Negative Events
APS, April 15, 2013—People believe they’ll be happy in the future, even when they imagine the many bad things that could happen, because they discount the possibility that those bad things will actually occur, according to a new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the changeability of people’s perceptions of happiness,” says psychological scientist Ed O’Brien of the University of Michigan. “On some days our futures seem bright and exciting, but on other days the same exact future event can feel stressful and terrifying.”
With this new research, O’Brien wanted to explore whether fluency—how easy or difficult it feels to think about different events—might play a role in how people think about well-being.
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Differences in Brain Activity in Children at Risk of Schizophrenia Predate Onset of Symptoms
CHAPEL HILL, NC; March 22, 2013—Research from the University of North Carolina has shown that children at risk of developing schizophrenia have brains that function differently than those not at risk.
Brain scans of children who have parents or siblings with the illness reveal a neural circuitry that is hyperactivated or stressed by tasks that peers with no family history of the illness seem to handle with ease.
Because these differences in brain functioning appear before neuropsychiatric symptoms such as trouble focusing, paranoid beliefs, or hallucinations, the scientists believe that the finding could point to early warning signs or “vulnerability markers” for schizophrenia.
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UNC Study Shows How Two Brain Areas Interact in Anxiety and Reward Behaviors
CHAPEL HILL, NC; March 20, 2013—New research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine for the first time explains exactly how two brain regions interact to promote emotionally motivated behaviors associated with anxiety and reward.
The findings could lead to new mental health therapies for disorders such as addiction, anxiety, and depression. A report of the research was published online by the journal, Nature, on March 20, 2013.
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Pig Brain Models Provide Insights into Human Cognitive Development
URBANA, March 14, 2013 –A mutual curiosity about patterns of growth and development in pig brains has brought two University of Illinois research groups together. Animal scientists Rod Johnson and Ryan Dilger have developed a model of the pig brain that they plan to use to answer important questions about human brain development.
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Do-Gooder or Ne'er-Do-Well? Study Examines How Previous Behavior Affects Current Moral Conduct
APS, March 7, 2013—Does good behavior lead to more good behavior? Or do we try to balance our good and bad deeds? The answer depends on our ethical mindset, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Psychological scientist Gert Cornelissen of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and colleagues found that people who have an “ends justify the means” mindset are more likely to balance their good and bad deeds, while those who believe that what is right and wrong is a matter of principle are more likely to be consistent in their behavior, even if that behavior is bad.
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Researchers Map Emotional Intelligence in the Brain
CHAMPAIGN, lll., January 22, 2013— A new study of 152 Vietnam veterans with combat-related brain injuries offers the first detailed map of the brain regions that contribute to emotional intelligence – the ability to process emotional information and navigate the social world.
The study found significant overlap between general intelligence and emotional intelligence, both in terms of behavior and in the brain. Higher scores on general intelligence tests corresponded significantly with higher performance on measures of emotional intelligence, and many of the same brain regions were found to be important to both.
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Feeling Guilty versus Feeling Angry: Who Can Tell the Difference?
September 24, 2012—Emotional Intelligence includes awareness of your own emotional states, but some are more difficult to nail down than others—especially for the clinically depressed, say researchers.
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Daniel Kahneman: Unveling the Two-faced Brain
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman. 2011. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. 512 pages.
March 20, 2012—How many of us are really open to the possibility of shattering our cherished biases and illusions, especially those that support the trust we maintain toward our own mind? Well, don't read Daniel Kahneman's latest book unless that is precisely what you are prepared to do. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman reveals what he has learned as a result of his Nobel Prize–winning research in judgment and decision making: human beings (and that includes you and me) are not the rational agents economists and decision theorists have traditionally assumed.
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If the Bluestocking Fits
Some words carry so much baggage that we cringe when we hear them. Don’t believe it? Try saying the word "intellectual" without feeling your lip curl up in just a little bit of a sneer. This sensation is especially baffling considering that most of us would support the value of a good education even without thinking about the mountain of research that says exercising the brain is good for both physical and mental health.
Long ago, of course—before we knew that the brain was such an influential organ—“men of letters" (cringing again) were relatively rare and they were highly valued as companions, advisors, and tutors. As the skills of reading and writing were passed on to those who could afford the leisure time to learn them, the lines between the educated and uneducated were usually drawn along class divisions, although in some times and cultures these extended to race and gender too.
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