Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
When the going gets tough, the tough get… more relief from a placebo?
Are you good at coping when life gets tough? Do people call you a straight-shooter? Will you help others without expecting anything in return?
Those personality traits might do more than help you win a popularity contest. According to new University of Michigan-led neuroscience research, those qualities also might make you more likely to get pain relief from a placebo – a fake medicine.
And, the researchers show, it’s not just your mind telling you the sham drug is working or not. Your brain’s own natural painkiller chemicals may actually respond to the pain differently depending on your personality.
If you’re more of an angry, hostile type, they find, a placebo won’t do much for you.
For the first time, the new findings link specific, established personality traits with an individual’s susceptibility to the placebo effect from a sham medicine for pain. The researchers showed a significant link between certain personality traits and how much relief people said they felt when given the placebo – as well as the level of a specific chemical that their brains released.
The work, published online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, was done by a team of U-M Medical School researchers and their colleagues at the University of North Carolina and University of Maryland.
One neuron has huge impact on brain behaviour
Researchers from Queensland and the USA have made a unique discovery about how the brain computes sensory information.
The study by scientists at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland (UQ) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA was conducted to better understand how circuits of nerve cells underlie behaviour.
Using advanced optical imaging in animal models, the research team was able to pinpoint a single neuron in the neocortex that signaled sensory behavior. This led to the discovery that active processes in its thin dendritic appendages are responsible for implementing the integration of sensory and motor signals.
“We have long known that active dendrites provide neurons with powerful processing capabilities,” says QBI’s Associate Professor Stephen Williams, who collaborated on the study. “However, little has been known about the role of neuronal dendrites in behaviourally related circuit computations. “We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the dendrites of nerve cells operate during behaviour to implement the integration of sensory and motor signals,” he said.
Such multi-modal integration enables the brain to perform at lightning speed, allowing animals to react to their environment in relation to existing knowledge. The paper, titled ‘Nonlinear dendritic integration of sensory and motor input during an active sensing task’ was published in the prestigious journal, Nature.
Researchers in the voice, speech, and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of rappers when they are “freestyling”—spontaneously improvising lyrics in real time. The findings, published online in the November 15 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, reveal that this form of vocal improvisation is associated with a unique functional reallocation of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and proposes a novel neural network that appears to be intimately involved in improvisatory and creative endeavors.
The researchers, led by Siyuan Liu, Ph.D., scanned the brains of 12 freestyle rap artists (who had at least 5 years of rapping experience) while they performed two tasks using an identical 8-bar musical track. For the first task, they improvised rhyming lyrics and rhythmic patterns guided only by the beat. In the second task, they performed a well-rehearsed set of lyrics.
During freestyle rapping, the researchers observed increases in brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for motivation of thought and action, but decreased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions that normally play a supervisory or monitoring role. Like an experienced parent who knows when to lay down the law and when to look the other way, these shifts in brain function may facilitate the free expression of thoughts and words without the usual neural constraints.
Freestyling also increased brain activity in the perisylvian system (involved in language production), the amygdala (an area of the brain linked to emotion), and cingulate motor areas, suggesting that improvisation engages a brain network that links motivation, language, mood, and action. Further studies of this network in other art forms that involve the innovative use of language, such as poetry and storytelling, could offer more insights into the initial, improvisatory phase of the creative process.
Uncommon Features of Einstein’s Brain Might Explain His Remarkable Cognitive Abilities
Portions of Albert Einstein’s brain have been found to be unlike those of most people and could be related to his extraordinary cognitive abilities, according to a new study led by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.
Falk, along with colleagues Frederick E. Lepore of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Adrianne Noe, director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, describe for the first time the entire cerebral cortex of Einstein’s brain from an examination of 14 recently discovered photographs. The researchers compared Einstein’s brain to 85 “normal” human brains and, in light of current functional imaging studies, interpreted its unusual features.
“Although the overall size and asymmetrical shape of Einstein’s brain were normal, the prefrontal, somatosensory, primary motor, parietal, temporal and occipital cortices were extraordinary,” said Falk, the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State. “These may have provided the neurological underpinnings for some of his visuospatial and mathematical abilities, for instance.”
The study, “The Cerebral Cortex of Albert Einstein: A Description and Preliminary Analysis of Unpublished Photographs,” was published in the journal Brain.
Please amputate this leg: it’s not mine
This wasn’t the first time that David had tried to amputate his leg. When he was just out of college, he’d tried to do it using a tourniquet fashioned out of an old sock and strong baling twine. David (not his real name) locked himself in his bedroom at his parents’ house, his bound leg propped up against the wall to prevent blood from flowing into it. After two hours the pain was unbearable, and fear sapped his will.
Undoing a tourniquet that has starved a limb of blood can be fatal: injured muscles downstream of the blockage flood the body with toxins, causing the kidneys to fail. Even so, David released the tourniquet himself; it was just as well that he hadn’t mastered the art of tying one.
Failure did not lessen David’s desire to be rid of the leg. It began to consume him, to dominate his awareness. The leg was always there as a foreign body, an impostor, an intrusion.
He spent every waking moment imagining freedom from the leg. He’d stand on his “good” leg, trying not to put any weight on the bad one. At home, he’d hop around. While sitting, he’d often push the leg to one side. The leg just wasn’t his. He began to blame it for keeping him single; but living alone in a small suburban townhouse, afraid to socialise and struggling to form relationships, David was unwilling to let anyone know of his singular fixation.
Study links exposure to light at night to depression, learning issues
For most of history, humans rose with the sun and slept when it set. Enter Thomas Edison, and with a flick of a switch, night became day, enabling us to work, play, and post cat and kid photos on Facebook into the wee hours.
However, according to a new study led by a Johns Hopkins biologist, this typical 21st- century scenario comes at a serious cost: When people routinely burn the midnight oil, they risk suffering depression and learning issues, and not only because of lack of sleep. The culprit could also be exposure to bright light at night from lamps, computers, and even iPads.
"Basically, what we found is that chronic exposure to bright light—even the kind of light you experience in your own living room at home or in the workplace at night if you are a shift worker—elevates levels of a certain stress hormone in the body, which results in depression and lowers cognitive function,” said Samer Hattar, a biology professor in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
The study, published in the Nov. 14 Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature, used mice to demonstrate how special cells in the eye (called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, or ipRGCs) are activated by bright light, affecting the brain’s center for mood, memory, and learning.
Bonobos Catch Yawns from Friends
For bonobos, yawning is contagious, but only between friends.
Yawns spread more easily between family and close friends, and from high-status monkeys to those lower on the totem pole, according to a study published online in the journal PLoS ONE. This pattern of social yawning mimics one found in humans and suggests infectious yawning is a byproduct of empathy, which coordinates emotions in a group.
"It underlines that the mechanism of yawn contagion in the two species is the same," said study co-author Elisabetta Palagi, a primate researcher at the University of Pisa in Italy. "One of the possible functions of yawn contagion is to synchronize individuals of a social group. In humans, yawn contagion is extremely important but just between people who share strong bonds."
Fantasy-Reality Confusion a Primary Cause of Childhood Nighttime Fears
From monsters under the bed to bogeymen in the closet, most children experience nighttime fears at some point in their development. And while most grow out of them without any professional intervention, others contend with persistent and extended periods of these fears, with a risk of developing anxiety problems later in life.
As part of a large-scale project on nighttime fears funded by the Israeli Science Foundation, Prof. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University’s School of Psychological Sciences is exploring how these fears fit into the normal developmental process — and when they become a problem. Together with Dr. Jonathan Kushnir, who completed his Ph.D. studies in the field in Prof. Sadeh’s lab, MA student Tamar Zisenwine, and Ph.D. student Michal Kaplan, he discovered that a child’s ability to differentiate fact from fiction has a huge impact on overcoming terror of things that go bump in the night.
In their study, published in Child Psychiatry and Human Development, the researchers found that preschoolers with persistent nighttime fears were far less able to distinguish reality from fantasy compared to their peers. The research will help clinicians and parents alike to develop interventions that can better soothe fretful children, he says, noting that a strong imagination can ultimately be used to the child’s psychological advantage.
The Road to Language Learning Is Iconic
Languages are highly complex systems and yet most children seem to acquire language easily, even in the absence of formal instruction. New research on young children’s use of British Sign Language (BSL) sheds light on one mechanism – iconicity – that may play an important role in children’s ability to learn language.
For spoken and written language, the arbitrary relationship between a word’s form – how it sounds or how it looks on paper – and its meaning is a particularly challenging feature of language acquisition. But one of the first things people notice about sign languages is that signs often represent aspects of meaning in their form. For example, in BSL the sign EAT involves bringing the hand to the mouth just as you would if you were bringing food to the mouth to eat it.
In fact, a high proportion of signs across the world’s sign languages are similarly iconic, connecting human experience to linguistic form.
Robin Thompson and colleagues David Vison, Bencie Woll, and Gabriella Vigliocco at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL) at University College London in the United Kingdom wanted to examine whether this kind of iconicity might provide a key to understanding how children come to link words to their meaning.
Their findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
(Photo: David Levene)
Hormone affects distance men keep from unknown women they find attractive
Men in committed relationships choose to keep a greater distance between themselves and an unknown woman they find attractive when given the hormone oxytocin, according to new research in the November 14 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest oxytocin may help promote fidelity within monogamous relationships.
Oxytocin plays a vital role in triggering childbirth and facilitating nursing. The hormone, which is produced in a region of the brain called the hypothalamus, is also involved in the formation of social bonds. In humans and other animals, this brain chemical is known to promote bonds between parents and children, and between couples. Additionally, previous studies have shown oxytocin increases trust among people. However, scientists had yet to determine what, if any, role oxytocin played in maintaining monogamous human relationships.
In the current study, led by René Hurlemann, MD, PhD, of the University of Bonn, researchers found that men in committed relationships who were given oxytocin kept a greater distance when approaching or being approached by an unknown woman they found attractive compared with those given a placebo. In contrast, oxytocin had no effect on single men.
“Previous animal research in prairie voles identified oxytocin as major key for monogamous fidelity in animals,” Hurlemann said. “Here, we provide the first evidence that oxytocin may have a similar role for humans.”