Chill-out...

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Thu, 11/13/2008 - 11:22.

From the "Random Samples" section of the Oct. 31 Science Magazine:

Cognitive therapy versus medication for depression

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Mon, 10/27/2008 - 16:35.

DeRubeis et al. offer an interesting review article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on treatment outcomes and neural mechanisms, from which I pass on part of the abstract and some summary graphs:

Evolution of Religious Prosociality

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Mon, 10/27/2008 - 16:33.

Norenzayan and Shariff offer an interesting review article on empirical evidence for religious prosociality. Here is one clip and two figures from the article.

Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Mon, 10/27/2008 - 16:32.

An article by Pies with the title of this post is worth reading. It deals with the criticism that modern psychiatric practice, in collusion with pill pushing pharmaceutical companies, has medicalized “normal sadness” brought on by external circumstances. (Added note: Pies has emailed this this link to a more detailed discussion posted on the PsychCentral website.) Here are some clips from the NYTimes article:

Arguing for Embodied Consciousness

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Thu, 10/16/2008 - 12:48.

I thought I would pass along portions of a review in Nature by Harold Fromm which has the title of this post, of Edward Slingerland's new book, "What Science Offers the Humanities - Integrating Body and Culture."

MRI of moral emotions while causing harm.

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Thu, 10/16/2008 - 12:46.

Kédia et al. perform brain imaging of subjects as they imagine harm in several different contexts of subject and victim:

Subliminal Neuroeconomics

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 11:24.

It turns out that we can learn to assess risks on the basis of visual hints we are not aware of seeing. In other words, without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brains can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making. Functional neuroimaging reveals a correlation of cue values and prediction errors with activity in ventral striatum during conditioning. From the summary in Nature:

For a kid to learn - positive strokes work way better than negative

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 11:22.

An interesting study by van Duijvenvoorde et al. compares the utility of positive versus negative strokes during learning in three age groups (8–9, 11–13, and 18–25 year of age). Cognitive control areas are engaged best by positive feedback in the youngest group, and by negative feedback in the oldest. Here is their abstract:

The sucker to saint effect.

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 11:21.

Here is an interesting tidbit in Psychological Science from Jordan and Monin. They suggest we protect our own self image by feeling morally superior when we otherwise might feel foolish.

Social exclusion causes unconscious mimicry

Submitted by Deric Bownds on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 11:19.

Lakin et al. make some interesting observations on our reactions to being socially excluded by others, we are likely to unconsciously start mimicking their behaviors: