Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Despite long experience with the ways of the world, older people are especially vulnerable to fraud. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), up to 80% of scam victims are over 65. One explanation may lie in a brain region that serves as a built-in crook detector. Called the anterior insula, this structure—which fires up in response to the face of an unsavory character—is less active in older people, possibly making them less cagey than younger folks, a new study finds.
Both FTC and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have found that older people are easy marks due in part to their tendency to accentuate the positive. According to social neuroscientist Shelley Taylor of the University of California, Los Angeles, research backs up the idea that older people can put a positive spin on things—emotionally charged pictures, for example, and playing virtual games in which they risk the loss of money. “Older people are good at regulating their emotions, seeing things in a positive light, and not overreacting to everyday problems,” she says. But this trait may make them less wary.
To see if older people really are less able to spot a shyster, Taylor and colleagues showed photos of faces considered trustworthy, neutral, or untrustworthy to a group of 119 older adults (ages 55 to 84) and 24 younger adults (ages 20 to 42). Signs of untrustworthiness include averted eyes; an insincere smile that doesn’t reach the eyes; a smug, smirky mouth; and a backward tilt to the head. The participants were asked to rate each face on a scale from -3 (very untrustworthy) to 3 (very trustworthy).
In the study, appearing online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the “untrustworthy” faces were perceived as significantly more trustworthy by the older subjects than by the younger ones. The researchers then performed the same test on a different set of volunteers, this time imaging their brains during the process, to look for differences in brain activity between the age groups. In the younger subjects, when asked to judge whether the faces were trustworthy, the anterior insula became active; the activity increased at the sight of an untrustworthy face. The older people, however, showed little or no activation.
Gustav Metzger Thinks About Nothing
In an attempt to create a visual representation of empty thoughts, artist Gustav Metzger hooked himself up to a robot carving machine, that turned his brainwaves into a sculpture.
This data was then fed to a manufacturing robot, which carved the Null Object sculpture out of a piece of Portland Stone.
The result is a brain-like object, dotted with crystalline, ovoid shapes. Metzger’s empty brain.
The project is being exhibited at London’s Work Gallery, and an accompanying book features further explorations of emptiness, including novelist Hari Kunzru on nothingness as a productive category, and Bronac Ferran on ‘the radical consequences of emptiness’.
Null Object: Gustav Metzger Thinks About Nothing, is at Work Gallery, 10a Acton Street, London WC1X, until 9 February 2013.
Researchers Confirm the “Pinocchio Effect”: When you Lie, your Nose Temperature Raises
When a person lies they suffer a “Pinocchio effect”, which is an increase in the temperature around the nose and in the orbital muscle in the inner corner of the eye. In addition, when we perform a considerable mental effort our face temperature drops and when we have an anxiety attack our face temperature raises. These are some of the conclusions drawn in this pioneer study conducted at the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology, which has introduced new applications of thermography.
Excitement is the Same in Men and Women
Sexual excitement and desire can be identified in men and women using thermography, since they induce an increase in chest and genital temperature. This study demonstrates that –in physiological terms– men and women get excited at the same time, even although women say they are not excited or only slightly excited.
When we lie on our feelings, the temperature around our nose raises and a brain element called “insula” is activated. The insula is a component of the brain reward system, and it only activates when we experience real feelings (called “qualias”). "The insula is involved in the detection and regulation of body temperature. Therefore, there is a strong negative correlation between insula activity and temperature increase: the more active the insule (the greater the feeling) the lower the temperature change, and viceversa", the researchers state.
The Thermal Footprint of Flamenco
Researchers also determined the thermal footprint of aerobic exercise and different dance modalities such as ballet. "When a person is dancing flamenco the temperature in their buttocks drops and increases in their forearms. That is the thermal footprint of flamenco, and each dance modality has a specific thermal footprint”, professor Salazar explains.
The researchers have demonstrated that temperature asymmetries in both sides of the body and local temperature changes are associated with the physical, mental and emotional status of the subject. "The thermogram is a somatic marker of subjective or mental states and allows us see what a person is feeling or thinking”, professor Salazar states.
Dopamine Not About Pleasure (Anymore)
To John Salamone, professor of psychology and longtime researcher of the brain chemical dopamine, scientific research can be very slow-moving.
“It takes a long time for things to change in science,” he says. “It’s like pulling on the steering wheel of an ocean liner, then waiting for the huge ship to slowly turn.”
Salamone has spent most of his career battling a particular long-held scientific idea: the popular notion that high levels of brain dopamine are related to experiences of pleasure. As increasing numbers of studies show, he says, the famous neurotransmitter is not responsible for pleasure, but has to do with motivation.
He summarizes and comments on the evidence for this shift in thinking in a Nov. 8 review in the Cell Press journal Neuron.
Men and women can now thank a dozen brain regions for their romantic fervor. Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neurotransmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure. Conversely, psychiatrists might someday help individuals who become dangerously depressed after a heartbreak by adjusting those chemicals.
Passion also heightens several cognitive functions, as the brain regions and chemicals surge. “It’s all about how that network interacts,” says Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, who led the study. The cognitive functions, in turn, “are triggers that fully activate the love network.”
(Graphics by James W. Lewis, West Virginia University (brain), and Jen Christiansen)
Social bee-haviour: The secret life of the hive
The extraordinary mental feats of bees are forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about intelligence. Prepare to be surprised at what a tiny brain can do as we take a look at some of what these industrious honey-makers get up to.
Origin of intelligence and mental illness linked to ancient genetic accident
Scientists have discovered for the first time how humans – and other mammals – have evolved to have intelligence. Researchers have identified the moment in history when the genes that enabled us to think and reason evolved.
This point 500 million years ago provided our ability to learn complex skills, analyse situations and have flexibility in the way in which we think. Professor Seth Grant, of the University of Edinburgh, who led the research, said: “One of the greatest scientific problems is to explain how intelligence and complex behaviours arose during evolution.”
The research, which is detailed in two papers in Nature Neuroscience, also shows a direct link between the evolution of behaviour and the origins of brain diseases. Scientists believe that the same genes that improved our mental capacity are also responsible for a number of brain disorders.
"This ground breaking work has implications for how we understand the emergence of psychiatric disorders and will offer new avenues for the development of new treatments," said John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, one of the study funders.
The study shows that intelligence in humans developed as the result of an increase in the number of brain genes in our evolutionary ancestors. The researchers suggest that a simple invertebrate animal living in the sea 500 million years ago experienced a ‘genetic accident’, which resulted in extra copies of these genes being made.
This animal’s descendants benefited from these extra genes, leading to behaviourally sophisticated vertebrates – including humans. The research team studied the mental abilities of mice and humans, using comparative tasks that involved identifying objects on touch-screen computers.
Researchers then combined results of these behavioural tests with information from the genetic codes of various species to work out when different behaviours evolved. They found that higher mental functions in humans and mice were controlled by the same genes.
The Brain: The Charlie Brown Effect
I am sitting in a darkened, closet-size lab at Tufts University, my scalp covered by a blue cloth cap studded with electrodes that detect electric signals from my brain. Data flow from the electrodes down rainbow-colored wires to an electroencephalography (eeg) machine, which records the activity so a scientist can study it later on.
Wearing this elaborate setup, I gaze at a television in front of me, focusing on a tiny cross at the center of the screen. The cross disappears, and a still image appears of Snoopy chasing a leaf. Then Charlie Brown takes Snoopy’s place, pitching a baseball. Lucy, Linus, and Woodstock visit as well. For the next half hour I stare at Peanuts comic strips, one frame at a time. The panels are without words, and while sometimes the action makes sense from frame to frame, at other times the Peanuts gang seems to be engaging in a series of unconnected shenanigans.
At the same time, a freshly minted Ph.D. named Neil Cohn is watching the readout from my brain, an exercise he has repeated with some 100 subjects to date. Many people would consider tracking Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes comic strips unworthy of scientific inquiry, but Cohn begs to differ. His evidence suggests that we use the same cognitive process to make sense of comics as we do to read a sentence. They seem to tap the deepest recesses of our minds, where we bring meaning to the world.
Why Is it Impossible to Stop Thinking, to Render the Mind a Complete Blank?
Forgive your mind this minor annoyance because it has worked to save your life—or more accurately, the lives of your ancestors. Most likely you have not needed to worry whether the rustling in the underbrush is a rabbit or a leopard, or had to identify the best escape route on a walk by the lake, or to wonder whether the funny pattern in the grass is a snake or dead branch. Yet these were life-or-death decisions to our ancestors. Optimal moment-to-moment readiness requires a brain that is working constantly, an effort that takes a great deal of energy. (To put this in context, the modern human brain is only 2 percent of our body weight, but it uses 20 percent of our resting energy.) Such an energy-hungry brain, one that is constantly seeking clues, connections and mechanisms, is only possible with a mammalian metabolism tuned to a constant high rate.
Constant thinking is what propelled us from being a favorite food on the savanna—and a species that nearly went extinct—to becoming the most accomplished life-form on this planet. Even in the modern world, our mind always churns to find hazards and opportunities in the data we derive from our surroundings, somewhat like a search engine server. Our brain goes one step further, however, by also thinking proactively, a task that takes even more mental processing.
So even though most of us no longer worry about leopards in the grass, we do encounter new dangers and opportunities: employment, interest rates, “70 percent off” sales and swindlers offering $20 million for just a small investment on our part. Our primate heritage brought us another benefit: the ability to navigate a social system. As social animals, we must keep track of who’s on top and who’s not and who might help us and who might hurt us. To learn and understand this information, our mind is constantly calculating “what if?” scenarios. What do I have to do to advance in the workplace or social or financial hierarchy? What is the danger here? The opportunity?
For these reasons, we benefit from having a brain that works around the clock, even if it means dealing with intrusive thoughts from time to time.
(Source: scientificamerican.com)
Preschoolers at play show science skills
When kids incessantly ask “Why?,” mess around in the dirt and run their hands over everything within reach, they’re not just being kids. It turns out they’re also being scientists.
Until recently, preschoolers were widely believed to be irrational thinkers. For most of the 20th century, the prevailing theory pioneered by cognitive development expert Jean Piaget held that children roughly ages 2 through 7 cannot understand concrete logic or other people’s perspectives.
Although young children are the only ones who truly know what they ponder, research conducted over the past decade has led many psychologists to see infants and toddlers as, in fact, capable of thinking logically and abstractly.
"The main thing is that they’re drawing conclusions from data and evidence and experiences the same way scientists are - by making hypotheses, testing them, analyzing statistics and even doing experiments, even though when they do experiments, it’s called ‘getting into everything,’ " said Alison Gopnik, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and one of the field’s leading experts.
Better understanding of how children learn about the world could have important implications for their formal schooling, Gopnik argued in a recent paper published in the journal Science, which summarized studies by her and other researchers.