Science of the SpiritS


Info

Babies Know What's Boring, Study Finds

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience
Wed, 23 May 2012 16:01 UTC
Baby Psychology
© University of RochesterLead author Celeste Kidd (shown here) says it's easier to study babies than adults, who know they are taking part in a psychology experiment.
Babies may be sponges for learning new information, but they are indeed active sponges, with new research showing that babies as young as 7 months are able to parse out the too-complex and downright boring, homing in on situations with just the right amount of "wow, how interesting" learning potential.

The study results, detailed this week online in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, provide evidence for an idea about baby cognition that makes intuitive sense, said lead study author Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

The thinking goes that babies organize their search for information in the world in a way that makes the most sense for efficient learning.

If a baby looks at something and it seems too simple, suggesting there's not much learning value, he or she won't pay attention to that situation or object, Kidd told LiveScience during a phone interview.

The same seems to play out for stuff that's too complex, which would seemingly hold a trove of learning potential, but which is actually not an efficient use of their brain time.
Read More...
Info

Perspective-Taking: A Strategy for Overcoming Bias

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Fri, 18 May 2012 20:19 UTC
Image
© PryereWhat would this guy do? Perspective-taking offers a way around the egocentric bias.
Most people are pretty bad at taking advice from others. People don't mind hearing the advice, they just hate to take it. This is one facet of what psychologists call the 'egocentric bias': the general rule that we think we know better.

The egocentric bias strikes in the boardroom, in schools, in hospitals and everywhere where two or more people are gathered together and one turns to the other and says: "What do you think?"

It's the reason why every person and every generation has to make its own mistakes. People have a tendency not to listen until after it's too late.

This is a real shame because a lot of the time other people have really important insights or experience that we don't have ourselves (e.g. The Impressive Power of a Stranger's Advice). We can't hope to know everything ourselves.
Read More...
Cut

Recovery from Pathological Relationships: Let Go or Be Dragged

Sandra Brown
Safe Relationships Magazine
Tue, 22 May 2012 19:56 UTC
Image
© Unknown
'Let Go or Be Dragged' - I don't know who wrote that slogan, but I loved it so much I bought it on a magnet. My first thought was, 'Oh, I LOVE that saying for the women!' But in a flash, I realized it's a slogan for everyone. A friend of mine in recovery said she loved it for her 'A.A.' recovery slogan. Another person told me she loved it as a spiritual theme - to hold with an open hand - OR - face the consequences. But, I do love it for all of you, here's why....

Pathological attachments are gorilla glue. The pathological partners have a vibe, a come-hither, bonding vortex that sucks you in and holds you there in a hypnotic-like trance. It's a powerful, seductive, subconscious attachment that mirrors the worst addictive feeling you could ever have. It vibrates throughout your body with a message and sensation that you will literally 'die' if you are disconnected from the source. Letting go never feels like an 'option,' it feels like sure death, death by disconnection, death by umbilical severing, death by life-force loss.
Read More...
Bell

New research shows bodily responses can govern how we think and feel

Chris Wickham
Reuters
Mon, 21 May 2012 16:12 UTC
sweating
If you want to know how ethical your broker is, give them a moral dilemma and see how much they sweat before deciding what to do.

It's quite a jump from the laboratory to real-world decisions about asset management but British researchers have found that gut feeling can override rational thought when people are faced with financial offers that look unfair.

Even when we could benefit, a physical response like sweating can make people reject a financial proposition they consider to be unjust. The key is how tuned in they are to their own bodies.
Read More...
Megaphone

Date Rape: A Mother's Story Of Survival For Our Daughters

Shannon Bradley-Colleary
Opposing Views
Tue, 22 May 2012 14:14 UTC
Image
© Unknown
"The thing about being murdered," writes William Langewiesche in May's issue of Vanity Fair, "it usually comes as a surprise."

The same can be said of date rape. When I awoke that bright spring morning of March 21st, 1986 in a pensione in Venice, Italy, I didn't expect the day to end on a dark, deserted beach with a boy I'd just met pinning me to the ground hissing in my ear that he had "un coltello" (a knife) and that "ho intenzione di ucciderti" (he'd kill me) if I didn't "f--k" him.

Getting dressed that morning I didn't know I'd have an out-of-body experience where I seemed to float above the scene, looking down at the two bodies grappling on the sand below feeling profoundly sad that my mom might never know what happened to me after I died on that beach so far from home.

I'm a mother now. My daughters are 8 and 9. The thought of them ever being in a similar situation is intolerable. Bad things can happen no matter how prepared and careful we are. But when my girls are old enough I'm going to share this story with them and hope they'll see the warning signs I missed.
Read More...
Bug

Spider Phobia Cured With 2-Hour Therapy

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience
Mon, 21 May 2012 14:01 UTC
Tarantula on Hand
© Shane Wilson Link | ShutterstockCan you imagine yourself holding this tarantula?

Getting up close and personal with a furry tarantula is probably the very last thing someone with a spider phobia would opt for, but the encounter may be the ticket to busting the brain's resistance to arachnids.

A tried-and-true exposure therapy, this one lasting just hours, changed activity in the brain's fear regions just minutes after the session was complete, researchers found.

"Before treatment, some of these participants wouldn't walk on grass for fear of spiders or would stay out of their home or dorm room for days if they thought a spider was present," said lead study author Katherina Hauner, postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in a statement.

After a single therapy session lasting up to three hours, "they were able to walk right up and touch or hold a tarantula. And they could still touch it after six months," Hauner said.

Spider phobia is a type of anxiety disorder called specific phobia, which also includes phobias of blood, needles, snakes, enclosed places and others. About 9.4 percent of the U.S. population has experienced a specific phobia at some point in their lifetime, Hauner said.

Hauner told LiveScience she hopes people who have specific phobias, particularly of spiders, will realize that successful treatments are out there, and that their phobias can take just hours to cure (though some cases can take a couple weeks to cure, she noted). "It's still not easy. It involves being motivated to overcome your fear."
Read More...
Arrow Down

Is Facebook Turning Us All Into Narcissists?

Alex Brokaw
Minyanville
Mon, 21 May 2012 09:29 UTC
Thumbsdown
© The Happy Hermit
While the financial world deliberates on whether Facebook's newly issued stock is a sage buy, academics have been looking at a slightly different aspect of the social-media megalith.

A recent New York Times blog post cited a number of studies concerned with mental health and Facebook usage. Researchers at Western Illinois University have just published a report in the medical journal Personality and Individual Differences, which examines the level of self-involvement in 292 Facebook users.

The findings determined those who actively engaged their Facebook account -- constantly updating their status, tagging themselves in pictures, and unrelentlessly pushing their friend count higher and higher -- had more narcissistic qualities than others.

A correlation between Facebook and narcissism, no kidding? Who would have thought that people who pretend to be more important than they actually are, persistently brag about and exaggerate their achievements, and are outrageously envious of others would employ a tool like Facebook to fuel their psychological malady?

Another study conducted at York University in Toronto, found narcissists spent in excess of an hour a day on the site. Here they're more likely than non-narcissists to "showcase" themselves, utilizing digitally altered photos and self-centered language.

On Facebook, apparently self-love is in the air.
Read More...
Info

Why Great Ideas Come When You Aren't Trying

Matt Kaplan
Nature
Mon, 21 May 2012 13:21 UTC
Ideas
© Jeremy Mayes/Getty ImagesArchimedes made his breakthrough discovery of displacement while relaxing in the bath.
History is rich with 'eureka' moments: scientists from Archimedes to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are said to have had flashes of inspiration while thinking about other things. But the mechanisms behind this psychological phenomenon have remained unclear. A study now suggests that simply taking a break does not bring on inspiration - rather, creativity is fostered by tasks that allow the mind to wander.

The discovery was made by a team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler, psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The researchers presented 145 undergraduate students with two 'unusual uses' tasks that gave them two minutes to list as many uses as possible for everyday objects such as toothpicks, clothes hangers and bricks.

After the two minutes were over, participants were given a 12-minute break, during which they rested, undertook a demanding memory activity that required their full attention or engaged in an undemanding reaction-time activity known to elicit mind-wandering. A fourth group of students had no break. All participants were then given four unusual-uses tasks, including the two that they had completed earlier.

Those students who had done the undemanding activity performed an average of 41% better at the repeated tasks the second time they tried them. By contrast, students in the other three groups showed no improvement. The work will be published shortly in Psychological Science1.

"We've traditionally found that rapid-eye-movement sleep grants creative insight. That allowing the mind to wander does the same is absolutely fascinating. I think they are on to something really interesting here," says Sara Mednick, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside.
Read More...
Info

Are Humans Becoming More or Less Psychopathic?

George Dvorsky
Sentient Developments
Thu, 10 May 2012 16:47 UTC
Brain
© IEET
Readers of this blog know that I've started to develop a bit of a fascination with psychopathy. It all got started after attending the Moral Brain conference at NYU last April. The more I look into this subject, the more I understand why so many neuroscientists are making such a big fuss about it.

The one statistic that has stuck with me is the observation that 1-2% of the general population is psychopathic. As previously noted, psychopathic traits don't always lead to crime or violence. In fact, studies have shown that 3-5% of business-minded persons are psychopathic; the realization that ruthlessness and indifference can lead to an interest and/or proclivity in business shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. What I would like to know, however, is whether or not there is a correlation between psychopathy and business success. Any bets that there isn't?

On a similar note, I'd like to know what degree of psychopathy exists amongst politicians and those who seek influence. I'm sure that, historically speaking, psychopathic traits have worked well for those hell bent on attaining and maintaining power.

The 1-2% figure also got me thinking about genetics. This ratio is exceedingly high, an indication that this trait is more than just the result of random mutation. Humans, it would seem, are predisposed for psychopathy. It's a personality condition that may have some adaptive qualities to it. The question we need to ask now, therefore, is: are we evolving out of it, or into it?

A strong case can be made for both. But whatever the answer, we will increasingly be able to do something about it through the use of neurological interventions and genetic engineering.
Read More...
Info

Emotionally Intelligent People Are Bad at Spotting Liars


LiveScience
Fri, 18 May 2012 09:41 UTC
People who rate themselves as having high emotional intelligence tend to overestimate their ability to detect deception in others. They were overconfident in assessing the sincerity of others.

Although emotional intelligence, in general, was not associated with being better or worse at discriminating between truths and lies, people with a higher ability to perceive and express emotion (a component of emotional intelligence) were not so good at spotting when people were telling lies.

"Taken together, these findings suggest that features of emotional intelligence, and the decision-making processes they lead to, may have the paradoxical effect of impairing people's ability to detect deceit," study researcher Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia, Canada, said in a statement. "This finding is important because emotional intelligence is a well-accepted concept and is used in a variety of domains, including the workplace."

The study was published today, May 18, in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.
Read More...