Science of the SpiritS


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Brain and Gut in Processing Emotion

brain cross-section
© UnknownFigure of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex from a screen shot of the iPad app Brain Tutor HD.
Intense emotional experiences frequently occur with bodily sensations such as a rapid heart rate or gastrointestinal distress.

It appears that bodily sensation (interoception) can be an important source of information when judging one's emotional. How the brain processes interoception is becoming better understood.

However, how the brain integrates interoceptive signals with other brain emotional processing circuits is less well understood.

Terasawa and colleagues from Japan recently presented results of their research on this interaction of interoception and emotion.

Eighteen graduate and undergraduate students were scanned using a 3T fMRI scanner.

Stimulus cues were separated into those in the interoceptive domain using the Body Perception Questionnaire and the emotional domain using the Positive and Negative Affect scale.

Magic Wand

A Person's Surname Can Influence Their Career, Experts Claim

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© Getty ImagesWilliam Wordsworth: scientists are exploring the theory that people are drawn to certain trades and professions based on the connotations of their surnames.
A person's surname can influence their choice of career, experts believe.

Scientists are exploring the theory that people are drawn to certain trades and professions based on the connotations of their surnames.

The phenomenon can be observed among famous figures such as the World champion sprinter Usain Bolt or the 18th century poet William Wordsworth.

However, serious research is now being dedicated to the concept - known as nominative determinism - to explain why it occurs.

New Scientist magazine coined the term after observing that the subject matter of a series of science books and articles bore relevance to the authors' surnames.

John Hoyland, the magazine's feedback editor, said: "A reader wrote in to tell me that they'd come across a paper on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology which was written by J W Splatt and D Weedon.

Family

How moms talk influences children's perspective-taking ability

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© Unknown
Young children whose mothers talk with them more frequently and in more detail about people's thoughts and feelings tend to be better at taking another's perspective than other children of the same age.

That's what researchers from the University of Western Australia found in a new longitudinal study published in the journal Child Development.

"Parents who frequently put themselves in someone else's shoes in conversations with their children make it more likely that their children will be able to do the same," according to Brad Farrant, postdoctoral fellow at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia, the study's lead author.

To learn more about how we develop the ability to take another's perspective, researchers looked at the influence of the way parents interact with and talk to their children. The two-year study involved more than 120 Australian children between the ages of 4 and 6 at the start of the study, both youngsters with typically developing language and those who were delayed in their acquisition of language. The participants were part of a larger ongoing longitudinal research project.

Question

Visions of Angels Described in Bible May Have Been Lucid Dreams

Elijah and the Angel
© Public domainElijah and the Angel by Bernardino Luini (1521).

Sleep researchers say they have established that many of the visions of angels and other religious encounters described in the Bible were likely "the products of spontaneous lucid dreams."

In a sleep study by the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles, 30 volunteers were instructed to perform a series of mental steps upon waking up or becoming lucid during the night that might lead them to have out-of-body experiences culminating in perceived encounters with an angel. Half of them succeeded, the researchers said.

Specifically, the volunteers were told to try to re-create the story of Elijah, a prophet who is referenced in the Talmud, the Bible and the Quran. In one of the stories in the Bible's Book of Kings, Elijah flees to the wilderness and falls asleep under a juniper tree, exhausted and prepared to die. Suddenly an angel shakes him awake and tells him to eat. He looks around and, to his surprise, sees a loaf of bread baked on some coals and a jug of water. Elijah eats the meal and goes back to sleep. Lead researcher Michael Raduga said this event was chosen from among a multitude of biblical passages involving religious visions during the night, because, "in terms of verifiable results, angels were the ideal choice, as Western culture provides a relatively well-established image for them (wings, white robes, halos, etc.)."

The research, which has not been reviewed by peers for scientific publication, does garner support from some dream researchers who were not involved in Raduga's study. They said the findings support further inquiry into the basis of such religious visions. One dream expert, however, pointed out that many religious tales of angelic encounters occurred in daytime, which suggests they could not have been dreams.

Toys

Letting babies 'cry it out' may be dangerous for their health

newborn
© Ernest FNewborn female infant, seconds after delivery
A psychologist has said that new developments in neuroscience show that letting babies "cry it out" is dangerous for their longterm health. Caregivers who respond promptly to a baby's need are more likely to have children who are independent.

According to the Psychologist Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Collaborative for Ethical Education at the University of Notre Dame, writing on Psychology Today, studies on rats with high and low nurturing mothers show there is a critical period of development in which genes for controlling anxiety are turned on for lifelong use. If in the first 10 days of life (equivalent to six months in a human being) a rat is exposed to a low nurturing mother, the genes controlling anxiety never get turned on and the rat lives the rest of its life anxious in new situations unless drugs are administered to alleviate anxiety. The researchers say similar genes exist in humans which are turned on by nurturing.

According to Narvaez: "We should understand the mother and child as a mutually responsive dyad. They are a symbiotic unit that make each other healthier and happier in mutual responsiveness. This expands to other caregivers too."

Magic Wand

Why Does Evolution Allow Some People to Taste Words?

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© Simon Fraser, Science Photo Library/Getty ImagesA diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scan of the brain shows bundles of nerve fibers.
Neural tangling called synesthesia may have creative benefits, experts say.

A neural condition that tangles the senses so that people hear colors and taste words could yield important clues to understanding how the brain is organized, according to a new review study.

This sensory merger, called synesthesia, was first scientifically documented in 1812 but was widely misunderstood for much of its history, with many experts thinking the condition was a form of mild insanity.

"It's not just that the number two is blue, but two is also a male number that wears a hat and is in love with the number seven," said study co-author David Brang, of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

"We're not sure if these personifications are [also a symptom of] synesthesia, but we think this is what derailed a lot of scientists from being interested in it. ... They thought these people were making it all up."

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Psychology researcher finds that second-guessing one's decisions leads to unhappiness

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© Unknown
You're in search of a new coffee maker, and the simple quest becomes, well, an ordeal. After doing copious amounts of research and reading dozens of consumer reviews, you finally make a purchase, only to wonder: "Was this the right choice? Could I do better? What is the return policy?"

Reality check: Is this you?

If so, new research from Florida State University may shed some light on your inability to make a decision that you'll be happy with.

Joyce Ehrlinger, an assistant professor of psychology, has long been fascinated with individuals identified among psychologists as "maximizers." Maximizers tend to obsess over decisions - big or small - and then fret about their choices later. "Satisficers," on the other hand, tend to make a decision and then live with it.

Happily.

Of course, there are shades of gray. In fact, there's a whole continuum of ways people avoid commitment without really avoiding it.

Ehrlinger's latest research on decision making was published in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences. The paper, "Failing to Commit: Maximizers Avoid Commitment in a Way That Contributes to Reduced Satisfaction," was co-authored with her graduate student, doctoral candidate Erin Sparks, and colleague Richard Eibach, a psychology assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. It examines whether "maximizers show less commitment to their choices than satisficers in a way that leaves them lesssatisfied with their choices."

Sherlock

Dehumanized Perception: A Brain's Failure to Appreciate Others May Permit Human Atrocities

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© UnknownLynndie England holding a leash attached to a prisoner, known to the Abu Ghraib guards as "Gus", who is lying on the floor
Shortcoming also may help explain how propaganda has contributed to torture and genocide.

A father in Louisiana bludgeoned and beheaded his disabled 7-year-old son last August because he no longer wanted to care for the boy.

For most people, such a heinous act is unconscionable.

But it may be that a person can become callous enough to commit human atrocities because of a failure in the part of the brain that's critical for social interaction. A new study by researchers at Duke University and Princeton University suggests this function may disengage when people encounter others they consider disgusting, thus "dehumanizing" their victims by failing to acknowledge they have thoughts and feelings.

This shortcoming also may help explain how propaganda depicting Tutsi in Rwanda as cockroaches and Hitler's classification of Jews in Nazi Germany as vermin contributed to torture and genocide, the study said.

Heart

The Ability to Love Takes Root in Earliest Infancy

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© Unknown
The ability to trust, love, and resolve conflict with loved ones starts in childhood - way earlier than you may think. That is one message of a new review of the literature in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. "Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behavior in romantic relationships 20 years later," says psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, the author, with University of Minnesota colleagues W. Andrew Collins and Jessica E. Salvatore. "Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren't aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind," about how you'll be treated or how worthy you are of love and affection.

While those attitudes can change with new relationships, introspection, and therapy, in times of stress old patterns often reassert themselves. The mistreated infant becomes the defensive arguer; the baby whose mom was attentive and supportive works through problems, secure in the goodwill of the other person.

Info

Dreams Do Discriminate: Racial Makeup Mimics Real Life

Sleeping Woman
© Afrociaal, ShutterstockWho populates your dreams?

Here's a new version of the old question "Do you dream in color?" What color are the people in your dreams?

A new study finds that the racial makeup of dreams tends to match up with the proportion of different races people run into in their daily lives. A person's own race matters as well, said study researcher Steve Hoekstra, a psychologist at Kansas Wesleyan University.

"If you are, say, a black student at a predominately white school in a predominately white community, yes, you dream more about whites than do other black people in other communities," Hoekstra told LiveScience. "But you also dream more about blacks than most people do in your same community."

The idea for the study quite literally came in a dream. Hoekstra's wife, Anne, noted in a lucid dreaming moment that there was an Asian person in the dream she was having. When she woke up, Anne, who is white, told her husband how odd it was that she didn't dream about Asian people more often, especially because she has an adopted sister who was born in Korea.

"We got to wondering: The race of people in dreams, to what degree does it reflect reality?" Hoekstra said. "Are people even aware of the race of people in their dreams, and if so, does it map onto either the racial composition of places where they live or to their own family?"