Science of the SpiritS


Heart - Black

Those who choose utilitarian ethics have empathy deficit, new study finds

Eric W. Dolan
The Raw Story
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:32 UTC
Those who would sacrifice one person to save five others score low on one particular measure of empathy, but not other measures, according to research published this month in the scientific journal PLoS One.

The study of 2748 people by Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht of the Institute of Cognitive Neurology in Argentina and Liane Young of Boston College found individuals who experienced low levels of compassion and concern for other people were more likely to embrace utilitarian ethics, which advocates the greatest good for the greatest number - even if that means harming a minority in the process.

"Utilitarian moral judgment in the current study was specifically associated with reduced empathy and not with any of the demographic or cultural variables tested," they wrote in the study. "Moreover, utilitarian moral judgment was determined uniquely by levels of empathic concern, independent of other aspects of empathic responding including personal distress and perspective taking."
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People

Decoding 'noisy' language in daily life: Study indicates how people make sense of confusing statements

Peter Dizikes
MIT News
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:03 UTC
Image
© Christine Daniloff/MIT
Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child."

A new study by MIT researchers indicates that when we process language, we often make these kinds of mental edits. Moreover, it suggests that we seem to use specific strategies for making sense of confusing information - the "noise" interfering with the signal conveyed in language, as researchers think of it.

"Even at the sentence level of language, there is a potential loss of information over a noisy channel," says Edward Gibson, a professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Gibson and two co-authors detail the strategies at work in a new paper, "Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation," published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Magic Wand

Do you obsess over your appearance? Your brain might be wired abnormally


University of California - Los Angeles
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:53 UTC
Body dysmorphic disorder is a disabling but often misunderstood psychiatric condition in which people perceive themselves to be disfigured and ugly, even though they look normal to others. New research at UCLA shows that these individuals have abnormalities in the underlying connections in their brains.

Dr. Jamie Feusner, the study's senior author and a UCLA associate professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues report that individuals with BDD have, in essence, global "bad wiring" in their brains - that is, there are abnormal network-wiring patterns across the brain as a whole.

And in line with earlier UCLA research showing that people with BDD process visual information abnormally, the study discovered abnormal connections between regions of the brain involved in visual and emotional processing.

The findings, published in the May edition of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, suggest that these patterns in the brain may relate to impaired information processing.

"We found a strong correlation between low efficiency of connections across the whole brain and the severity of BDD," Feusner said. "The less efficient patients' brain connections, the worse the symptoms, particularly for compulsive behaviors, such as checking mirrors."
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People 2

The enemy of my friend: Altruistic punishment in humans called into question

Stuart Mason Dambrot
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Sat, 27 Apr 2013 06:13 UTC
(Phys.org) - That Homo sapiens exhibits both cooperative and competitive behavior is a topic that continues to be the subject of ongoing discussion. In terms of cooperation, altruism (a selfless type of prosocial behavior in which an organism acts to benefit another at a cost to itself), has received significant attention from evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, game theorists, and computer scientists. In particular, altruistic punishment - in which individuals who, at no apparent benefit (or even at a cost) to themselves, punish someone who has treated another unfairly - has been demonstrated in a range of studies. Recently, however, scientists at the University of Miami posited that the evidence for these results is possibly affected by experimental artifacts, and is therefore questionable. To address their hypothesis, the researchers designed and performed an experiment without such artifacts, finding that while victims punished offenders, witnesses did not - and moreover reacted with envy for ill-gotten gains rather than moralistic anger. In addition, a second experiment showed that previous evidence was due to what is known as affective forecasting error (inaccurate estimations of reactions to hypothetical situations). The scientists concluded that evidence supporting human altruistic punishment has been overstated.
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Butterfly

Peaceful mind: Five steps to feeling relaxed fast

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© flickr.com/severalseconds
How to fight a psychological scourge of the modern world.

We worry about work, money, our health, our partners, children...the list goes on.

And let's face it, there are plenty of things to worry about, and that's even before you've turned on the news. This means that when the mind is given an idle moment, often what it seems to fill it with is worrying.

Worry can be useful if it's aimed at solving problems but less useful when it's just making us unhappy or interfering with our daily lives.

The standard psychological methods for dealing with everyday worry are pretty simple. But just because they're simple and relatively well-known doesn't mean we don't need reminding to use them from time-to-time.

So here is a five-step plan called "The Peaceful Mind" that was actually developed by psychologists specifically for people with dementia (Paukert et al., 2013). Because of this it has a strong focus on the behavioural aspects of relaxation and less on the cognitive. That suits our purposes here as the cognitive stuff (what you are worrying about) can be quite individual, whereas the behavioural things, everyone can do.

Comment: There are myriad relaxation techniques out there, but not many of them can attest to having not only immediate effects, but also having a highly practical application. Éiriú Eolas can assist with reducing stress, calming and focusing your mind and increasing a sense of connection with others in your community. It will also help you to have improved overall health, a stronger immune system and will also help you to heal emotional wounds; anything that may hinder or prevent you from leading a healthy and fulfilling life.

Visit the Éiriú Eolas site or participate on the forum to learn more about the scientific background of this program and then try it out for yourselves, free of charge

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Info

Why we don't see ourselves as others do

Emily Sohn
Discovery News
Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:30 UTC
Mirror, Mirror
© Adrianna Williams/Corbis
In a recent Dove ad, an FBI forensic artist sketched a series of women based purely on the way they described themselves and again as others described them. The artist could only hear their voices, not see their faces.

A video about the experiment, which has been viewed on YouTube more than 22 million times and counting, revealed stark difference between the way the women saw themselves and the way others saw them. Across the board, the self-described portraits were the least attractive -- suggesting, according to the Dove marketing team, that we are all more beautiful than we think we are.

So, why can't we see ourselves as we really are?

Over the course of our lives, experts said, our sense of self-image develops through a complicated interplay between cultural ideals, life experiences and accumulated comments by others. The result is, inevitably, a distortion of reality.

"You could look at a photograph and you would always be able to pick yourself out because we all have internal representations of what we look like," said David Schlundt, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

"But all of your experiences, all the teasing you went through as a child, all the self-consciousness you had as a teenager, and all the worrying about whether you would be accepted as good enough or attractive enough are called forth in" how people think of themselves, Schlundt said. "It's not a perceptual thing. It's a combination of emotion, meaning and experience that builds up over our lifetime and gets packaged into a self-schema."
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Eye 2

Psychopaths are not neurally equipped to have concern for others


sciencedaily.com
Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:08 UTC
Apr. 24, 2013 - Prisoners who are psychopaths lack the basic neurophysiological "hardwiring" that enables them to care for others, according to a new study by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago and the University of New Mexico.
Image
© Alexey Klementiev / FotoliaNew research finds that prisoners who are psychopaths lack the basic neurophysiological "hardwiring" that enables them to care for others.
"A marked lack of empathy is a hallmark characteristic of individuals with psychopathy," said the lead author of the study, Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago. Psychopathy affects approximately 1 percent of the United States general population and 20 percent to 30 percent of the male and female U.S. prison population. Relative to non-psychopathic criminals, psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate amount of repetitive crime and violence in society.

"This is the first time that neural processes associated with empathic processing have been directly examined in individuals with psychopathy, especially in response to the perception of other people in pain or distress," he added.

The results of the study, which could help clinical psychologists design better treatment programs for psychopaths, are published in the article, "Brain Responses to Empathy-Eliciting Scenarios Involving Pain in Incarcerated Individuals with Psychopathy," which appears online April 24 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
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Magic Wand

Networking: Whales able to learn from others

Fiona MacLeod
University of St. Andrews
Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:12 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Humpbacks pass on hunting tips.

Humpback whales are able to pass on hunting techniques to each other, just as humans do, new research has found.

A team of researchers, led by the University of St Andrews, has discovered that a new feeding technique has spread to 40 per cent of a humpback whale population.

The findings are published today (Thursday 25 April) by the journal Science.

The community of humpback whales off New England, USA, was forced to find new prey after herring stocks - their preferred food - crashed in the early 1980s.

The solution the whales devised - hitting the water with their tails while hunting a different prey - has now spread through the population by cultural transmission. By 2007, nearly 40 per cent of the population had been seen doing it.

Dr Luke Rendell, lecturer in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews, said: "Our study really shows how vital cultural transmission is in humpback populations - not only do they learn their famous songs from each other, they also learn feeding techniques that allow them to buffer the effects of changing ecology."

The team - also including Jenny Allen from the University of St Andrews, Mason Weinrich of the Whale Center of New England and Will Hoppitt from Anglia Ruskin University - used a new technique called network-based diffusion analysis to demonstrate that the pattern of spread followed the network of social relationships within the population, showing that the new behaviour had spread through cultural transmission, the same process that underlies the diversity of human culture.
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Info

Consciousness after death: Strange tales from the frontiers of resuscitation medicine

Brandon Keim
Wired.com
Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:23 UTC
Consciousness
© Emilio Labrador/Flickr
Sam Parnia practices resuscitation medicine. In other words, he helps bring people back from the dead - and some return with stories. Their tales could help save lives, and even challenge traditional scientific ideas about the nature of consciousness.

"The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated," said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school's resuscitation research program. "It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside."

Resuscitation medicine grew out of the mid-twentieth century discovery of CPR, the medical procedure by which hearts that have stopped beating are revived. Originally effective for a few minutes after cardiac arrest, advances in CPR have pushed that time to a half-hour or more.

New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what's thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.

It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it's neurologically inexplicable, at least with what's now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project's AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically.

Parnia discusses his work in the new book Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. Wired talked to Parnia about resuscitation and the nature of consciousness.
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People

Whether human or hyena, there's safety in numbers

Andy Henion , Joseph Cesario , Carlos Navarrete
Michigan State University
Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:10 UTC
Image
© Michigan State UniversityA study led by Joseph Cesario, Michigan State University assistant professor of psychology, suggests people see threats as farther away when they are part of a group and closer when they are alone.
Humans, when alone, see threats as closer than they actually are. But mix in people from a close group, and that misperception disappears.

In other words, there's safety in numbers, according to a new study by two Michigan State University scholars. Their research provides the first evidence that people's visual biases change when surrounded by members of their own group.

"Having one's group or posse around actually changes the perceived seriousness of the threat," said Joseph Cesario, lead author on the study and assistant professor of psychology. "In that situation, they don't see the threat quite so closely because they have their people around to support them in responding to the threat.'"

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study appears online in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The study was inspired by MSU zoologist Kay Holekamp's research with wild hyenas in Kenya. Holekamp and her team played recordings of hyenas from other parts of Africa and found the hyenas listening to the voices were more likely to approach the source of the sound when they were in groups and more likely to flee when they were alone.
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