“Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” Most people easily pick up on the importance of television programming like Sesame Street and other educational shows for young children. Shows like these embed lessons about letters, manners, multiculturalism and more into their content. For adults, the lessons seem obvious, so we feel good about allowing …
Category Archive: General Psychology
What are online-dating sites really selling you?
Many dating sites advertise that they will match you with a partner who is highly compatible. Those signing up for Chemistry.com, eHarmony, or similar other websites, are asked to complete prescreening information about their background and personality, and then are given matches with similar others based on this information. But how much does background and …
Revisit: fMRI and the “lit up” brain
I wrote a post a few months ago about some common misconceptions about functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and one of my main points was that the term ’lights up”, which is often used when describing the areas of the brain that respond to a task, is misleading. Here is what I said on the subject: …
Finding the motivation to stick with goals
Most of us have gotten loyalty cards at one point or another that treated us to a free item after a certain amount of purchases at that particular establishment. Most of us have also tossed more than one of those cards after realizing they weren’t worth the space in our wallets for the amount of …
Are afternoon naps key to enhancing learning?
Maybe cats and kindergartners are on to something: Recent research out of the University of California, Berkeley suggests that taking an afternoon nap might lead to increases in learning ability throughout the day! Research out of the the Sleep & Memory Lab led by Matt Walker up at UCB shows that, in general, our learning …
Space Invader: Patient with Amygdala Damage Disregards Personal Space
Recent research by Ralph Adolphs, a neuroscientist at Cal Tech, suggests that the amygdala, an almond-shaped brain structure buried deep within the temporal lobes, is important for maintaining a sense of personal space. When walking up to a stranger, most people prefer to keep their distance– while the precise distance depends on the individual, we …
A Nation Divided: Partisanship and Morality
It seems that the divide between conservatives and liberals grows sharper every day, especially during election season. But what is the source of this bitter partisanship? Research by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham may begin to provide an answer. Their research suggests that people of different political affiliations are not merely divided over the specific …
Swing state neurons?
In a tight election, attention immediately turns to swing voters. Poll analysts swarm them with a barrage of questions to predict which candidate may garner more of their crucial votes. In anticipation of the 2008 election, analysts went one step further and looked not only at swing voters’ survey responses but also their neural responses.
Changing How We Look at Mental Illness and Changing Lives
One in five children in the US suffers from mental illness, but less than 25% of those children actually receive mental health services. That’s absolutely terrifying, especially if you consider all the kids who have other psychological struggles but don’t meet diagnostic criteria for a psychological disorder. How many children then aren’t getting the help …
Why do we blame the victim?
Have you ever wondered why people tend to blame the victim for the negative circumstances that befall them? Social psychologists have! Melvin Lerner coined the term “belief in a just world” to describe the cognitive bias people have that the world is governed by justice. He and other researchers have investigated how this belief relates …
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