Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
How your brain likes to be treated at revision time
If you’re a student, you rely on one brain function above all others: memory.
These days, we understand more about the structure of memory than we ever have before, so we can find the best techniques for training your brain to hang on to as much information as possible. The process depends on the brain’s neuroplasticity, its ability to reorganise itself throughout your life by breaking and forming new connections between its billions of cells.
How does it work? Information is transmitted by brain cells called neurons. When you learn something new, a group of neurons activate in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. It’s like a pattern of light bulbs turning on.
Your hippocampus is forced to store many new patterns every day. This increases hugely when you are revising. Provided with the right trigger, the hippocampus should be able to retrieve any pattern. But if it keeps getting new information, the overworked brain might go wrong. That’s what happens when you think you’ve committed a new fact to memory, only to find 15 minutes later that it’s disappeared again.
So what’s the best way to revise? Here are seven top tips to get information into your brain and keep it there.
Photographer Volker Gutgessell has spent the last four years visiting Frankfurt Zoo capturing these sensitive images of bonobos, gorillas and orangutans. Standing for several hours a day, the 58-year-old has documented the behaviours and expressions of his subjects - despite suffering chronic back pain caused by a severe slipped disc. Volker also developed tinnitus as a result of his injury, causing a constant ringing in his ears. But despite his condition, he has found a way of communicating through his pictures and picks up on the body language of his ape “models” while shooting them.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Primates teach us about society
A Swiss primatologist who arrived at The University of Western Australia in April to work in the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology probably won’t mind too much if his students start ‘monkeying around’ occasionally in class.
Assistant Professor Cyril Grueter is used to it, having spent almost two years in Yunnan - a remote mountainous region of China - studying a group of 400 black and white snub-nosed monkeys.
The monkeys - never seen outside China - live in similar social groups to humans and Assistant Professor Grueter observed them in their wild state to investigate the evolutionary pathways that lead to our multilevel societies. His study was recently published in the International Journal of Primatology.
Science Explains Instant Attraction
How do you know when you’re attracted to a new face? Thank your medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region now discovered to play a major role in romantic decision-making.
Different parts of this region, which sits near the front of the brain, make a snap judgment about physical attraction and about whether the person is Mr. or Ms. Right — all within milliseconds of seeing a new face, a new study from Ireland finds.
The research is the first to use real-world dating to examine how the brain makes fast romantic judgments.
Early treatment sparks striking brain changes in autism
When given early treatment, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) made significant improvements in behavior, communication, and most strikingly, brain function, Yale School of Medicine researchers report in a new study.
The study was published in the current issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders by Yale Child Study Center researchers Dr. Fred Volkmar, Kevin A. Pelphrey, and their colleagues.
The results suggest that brain systems supporting social perception respond well to an early intervention behavioral program called pivotal response treatment. This treatment includes parent training, and employs play in its methods.
Crowdsourcing insects rely on their collective brain power
When ants are confronted with information overload and face too many decisions — about where to live, for instance — they revert to the wisdom of the crowd.
Despite having a brain smaller than the point of a pin, one ant species uses an elaborate system of sending out scouts to look for new homes. The scouts report back, and then the whole colony votes, according to researchers at Arizona State University.
The ants use chemistry and crowdsourcing, wrote associate professor of biology Stephen C. Pratt and graduate student Takao Sasaki at Arizona State University, in the current issue of Current Biology.
"They have tiny brains, but nonetheless, they are able to do quite a bit with them," Pratt said. Honey bees also have small brains but each brain has about a million neurons, which collectively have "quite a lot of processing power." Bees use a tail-wagging dance to communicate.
The ants involved in the ASU study, Temnothorax rugatulus are red, about one-tenth of an inch long, and live in crevices between rocks in forests in the western U.S. and parts of Europe.
Prenatal Testosterone Levels Influence Later Response to Reward
New findings led by Dr. Michael Lombardo, Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at the University of Cambridge indicate that testosterone levels early in fetal development influence later sensitivity of brain regions related to reward processing and affect an individual’s susceptibility to engage in behavior, that in extremes, are related to several neuropsychiatric conditions that asymmetrically affect one sex more than the other.
Although present at low levels in females, testosterone is one of the primary sex hormones that exerts substantial influence over the emergence of differences between males and females. In adults and adolescents, heightened testosterone has been shown to reduce fear, lower sensitivity to punishment, increase risk-tasking, and enhance attention to threat. These effects interact substantially with context to affect social behavior.
This knowledge about the effects of testosterone in adolescence and adulthood suggests that it is related to influencing the balance between approach and avoidance behavior. These same behaviors are heightened in the teenage years and also emerge in extremes in many neuropsychiatric conditions, including conduct disorder, depression, substance abuse, autism, and psychopathy.
Scientists have long known that sex differences influence many aspects of psychiatric disorders, including age of disease onset, prevalence, and susceptibility. For example, according to the World Health Organization, depression is twice as common in women than men, whereas alcohol dependence shows the reverse pattern. In addition to many other factors, sex hormone levels are likely to be important factors contributing to sex differences in psychopathology.
However, research to date has mainly focused on sex hormone levels during adolescence and adulthood, when hormone levels are heightened and built upon substantial prior developmental experience. Sex hormone levels are also heightened during critical periods of fetal brain development, but the impact of such prenatal surges in sex hormone levels on subsequent adult brain and behavioral development has received relatively little attention.
"This study is the first to directly examine whether testosterone in fetal development predicts tendencies later in life to engage in approach-related behavior (e.g., fun-seeking, impulsivity, reward responsivity) and also how it may influence later brain development that is relevant to such behaviors," said first author Lombardo.
In this study, they tested a unique cohort of boys, 8-11 years of age, whose fetal testosterone had been previously measured from amniotic fluid at 13-20 weeks gestation. The boys were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to assess changes in brain activity while viewing pictures of negative (fear), positive (happy), neutral, or scrambled faces.
They found that increased fetal testosterone predicted more sensitivity in the brain’s reward system to positively, compared to negatively, valenced facial cues. This means that reward-related brain regions of boys with higher fetal testosterone levels respond more to positive facial emotion compared to negative facial emotion than boys who with smaller levels of fetal testosterone.
In addition, increased fetal testosterone levels predicted increased behavioral approach tendencies later in life via its influence on the brain’s reward system. Lombardo explained, “This work highlights how testosterone in fetal development acts as a programming mechanism for shaping sensitivity of the brain’s reward system later in life and for predicting later tendency to engage in approach-related behaviors. These insights may be especially relevant to a number of neuropsychiatric conditions with skewed sex ratios and which affect approach-related behavior and the brain’s reward system.”
Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented, “These remarkable data provide new evidence that hormonal exposures early in life can have lasting impact on brain function and behavior.”
(Source: alphagalileo.org)
Cockatoo ‘can make its own tools’
A cockatoo from a species not known to use tools in the wild has been observed spontaneously making and using tools for reaching food and other objects.
A Goffin’s cockatoo called ‘Figaro’, that has been reared in captivity and lives near Vienna, used his powerful beak to cut long splinters out of wooden beams in its aviary, or twigs out of a branch, to reach and rake in objects out of its reach.
Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Vienna filmed Figaro making and using these tools. How the bird discovered how to make and use tools is unclear but shows how much we still don’t understand about the evolution of innovative behaviour and intelligence.
A report of the research is published this week in Current Biology.
PTSD linked to smaller brain area regulating fear response
Recent combat veterans who are diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder have significantly smaller volume in an area of the brain critical for regulating fear and anxiety responses, according to research led by scientists at Duke University and the Durham VA Medical Center.
The finding, published Nov. 5, 2012, in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, for the first time provides clear evidence that smaller amygdala volume is associated with PTSD, regardless of the severity of trauma. But it’s not clear whether the physiological difference was caused by a traumatic event, or whether PTSD develops more readily in people who naturally have smaller amygdalas.
“Researchers found 20 years ago that there were changes in volume of the hippocampus associated with PTSD, but the amygdala is more relevant to the disorder,” said Rajendra A. Morey, M.D., M.S., assistant professor at Duke and lead author of the study. Morey said studies in animals have established the amygdala’s role in regulating fear, anxiety and stress responses, but its effect on human behavior is less well known.
“It’s associated with how fear is processed, especially abnormal fear processing.” Morey said. “So it makes sense to look at the structure of the amygdala.”
(Photo: U.S. Army)
Women’s body talk: perception stronger than reality?
How women think their friends feel about their bodies influences their own body concerns, according to a new study by Dr. Louise Wasylkiw and Molly Williamson from Mount Alison University in Canada. Their work, which examines the role of friends in young women’s body concerns, is published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.
Research shows that friends influence how girls and women view and judge their own body weight, shape and size. What Wasylkiw and Williamson’s work sheds light on, is how much of a young woman’s body concerns are shaped by her perceptions of peers’ concerns with their own body versus her peers’ actual body concerns.