When a romantic relationship isn’t going well it seems like it influences everything in life. This brings up a slew of interesting questions. What is the exact nature of a relationship’s influence on unrelated decisions? How might different kinds of relationship troubles influence people in different ways? For example, in what ways do you behave differently when you’re considering breaking up your significant other as opposed to when you feel like they’re considering breaking up with you? […]

The researchers found that feeling as though your partner was the reason for incompatibility led people to become “promotion focused” – a psychological orientation where the tendency is to be motivated by gains, growth, and not missing out on positive outcomes. On other hand, when people felt that they were the reason for the incompatibility, it led to a “prevention focus” — an orientation where the tendency to is to be motivated by the need to maintain responsibilities and avoid negative outcomes.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

photo { Isabel Martinez }

Findings from a first-of-its-kind study by Indiana University researchers confirm anecdotal evidence that exercise—absent sex or fantasies—can lead to female orgasm.

While the findings are new, reports of this phenomenon, sometimes called “coregasm” because of its association with exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years. […]

“The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting,” Herbenick said. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm.”

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

How does the brain decide between actions? Is it through comparisons of abstract representations of outcomes or through a competition in a sensorimotor map defining the actions themselves?

{ Neural Mechanisms for Interacting with a World Full of Action Choices | via Thoughts on Thoughts | Continue reading }

related { New Mind-Reading Device Lets Paralyzed People Type }

photo { Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari }

Manufacturers all have their own recipes for creating their fireworks; but the basic chemistry behind is the same for any fireworks.

Manufacturers start by combining a mixture of metals and oxidizers such as chlorates, perchlorates, or nitrates. The type of metals used influences the fireworks colours while the oxidizers provide the oxygen needed to achieve the required temperature for the reaction. Water is also added to the mixture to bind the metals and oxidizers together. This damp mixture is then cut into smaller pieces known as “stars”.

The manufacturers then fill a fireworks shell with “stars” and black powder, a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur. A time-delay fuse is also inserted into the shell which ignites the black powder and stars causing the shell to burst open.

There are 5 basic colours for fireworks, and each colour is produced by a different metal:

Red—strontium
Green—barium
Yellow—sodium
Blue—copper
White—aluminum, magnesium, or titanium

[…]

“Some colours are pretty easy, and those colours would be red and green,” says Worsey, “but you can tell how good a firework manufacturer is by the quality of their blues.” Blue is such a difficult colour to produce because the reaction temperature has to be perfect.

[…]

Some fireworks create familiar shapes like as rings, stars, and hearts as they explode. The trick behind these fireworks is the plastic mold that’s placed inside the fireworks shell.

{ Basal Science Clarified | Continue reading }

artwork { Cy Twonbly, Untitled, 1993 }

Psychiatrists used to say that personality never changes. […] Recent years have revealed a more liberating picture. Rather than being set in stone, qualities and traits evolve (often subtly) over time. Research shows that you aren’t likely to be the same person at 90 as you were at 19.

Although we are all different some general patterns occur. Typically, we become more introverted and more emotionally stable when progressing into older age (from 65+). Crucially, an average retired person is more ‘agreeable’ than either a young or middle-aged adult: they are more likely to be empathetic, considerate, friendly, generous, and helpful. […]

A large ‘quality of life’ survey performed in the UK and USA looked at the mental and physical well-being of 10,000 men and women. Comparing the differences between younger and older adults – physical health is worse after the age of 60 (no surprises there), but, mental wellbeing actually improves.

{ Doctor Stu’s Blog | Continue reading }

images { Julianna Brion | Hudson Hayden }

Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good? […]

Until about three million years ago the ancestors of Homo sapiens were mostly vegetarians, and they most likely wandered in groups from site to site where fruit, tubers, and other vegetable food could be harvested. Their brains were only slightly larger than those of modern chimpanzees. By no later than half a million years ago, however, groups of the ancestral species Homo erectus were maintaining campsites with controlled fire — the equivalent of nests — from which they foraged and returned with food, including a substantial portion of meat. Their brain size had increased to midsize, between that of chimpanzees and modern Homo sapiens. The trend appears to have begun one to two million years previously, when the earlier prehuman ancestor Homo habilis turned increasingly to meat in its diet. With groups crowded together at a single site, and an advantage added by cooperative nest building and hunting, social intelligence grew, along with the centers of memory and reasoning in the prefrontal cortex.

Probably at this point, during the habiline period, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, versus group-level selection, with competition among groups. The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor. The competitor between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

{ Opinionator/NY Times | Continue reading }

His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another. […]

People are able to cheat more when they cheat for other people. In some experiments, people cheated the most when they didn’t benefit at all. […]

Small dishonesties matter because they can lead to larger ones. Once you behave badly, at some point, you stop thinking of yourself as a good person at that level and you say, What the hell. […]

We think if we make the punishments harsh enough, people will cheat less. But there is no evidence that this approach works. Think of the death penalty.

{ Dan Ariely/Time | Continue reading }

You see a shopper trip over in a busy street. Someone else can help. That’s what you tell your conscience. This is the Bystander Effect in action - the dilution of our sense of responsibility in the presence of other people - and it’s been demonstrated in numerous studies over many years.

But life is complicated and psychologists have begun looking at the circumstances that can nullify or even reverse the effect.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1963 }

{ In a study of more than a thousand compliments, women accepted compliments from other women 22% of the time. When they came from men? 68%. | The Beheld | full story }

photo { Bill Sullivan }

People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may usher the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. […]

Researchers found that individuals were still able to accurately recall the cause of the event even after they’ve been trained to forget the consequences and personal meaning associated with the memory.

{ Medical Daily | Continue reading }

Applied Cognitive Psychology recently published a study on […] walking while texting (WwT). […]

The researchers looked at how walking while texting alters an individual’s own walking behavior. The researchers found that, on average, people who engaged in WwT where much more cautious than walkers who weren’t texting. Despite this excess in caution, “texters” did not avoid obstacles with more ease than “non-texters.” The scientists concluded that being overly cautious while texting does not decrease the chances of being involved in an accident. […]

In 2010, The Pew Research Center reported that 17% of adult Americans admit to having bumped into objects while texting.

{ Salamander Hours | Continue reading }

photo { Andy Reynolds }

We know that love lives in the brain, not in the heart. But where in the brain is it – and is it in the same place as sexual desire? A recent international study is the first to draw an exact map of these intimately linked feelings.

“No one has ever put these two together to see the patterns of activation,” says Jim Pfaus, professor of psychology at Concordia University. “We didn’t know what to expect – the two could have ended up being completely separate. It turns out that love and desire activate specific but related areas in the brain.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

painting { François Boucher, Venus Consoling Love, 1751 }

Recent world tragedies have led to an increased emphasis on the importance of deception training - especially at security checkpoints in airports, bus terminals, and train stations – that is designed to avert potential terrorist attacks. Past research on deception has identified the physiological and behavioral cues that can expose the individual liar, but most major terrorist acts involve two or more coconspirators. […]

 “Deception has been studied as an almost exclusively individual-level phenomenon,” said Tripp Driskell. “You have a hard-nosed detective on one side of a desk and a suspect on the other. But there are many situations today, especially in security settings, in which the opportunity exists to question two or more suspects. The bottom line is that there are many occasions in which people conspire to lie or to deceive. In fact, many terrorist acts are carried out jointly by multiple participants or conspirators, and initial encounters with these suspects are likely to be in a group setting.” 

“We believe that the key to distinguishing truthful dyads from deceptive dyads is the concept of transactive memory,” he continued. “Two people describe an event differently if they had actually performed that event together versus if they did not but are fabricating a story about an event that did not take place. When we are questioned about the event, we recall it also in a joint manner - you recall some information and I recall some information. This is not as evident when two people recall a story that is fabricated or that did not take place.”

{ Human Factors and Ergonomics Society | Continue reading }

Could mirror universes or parallel worlds account for dark matter — the ‘missing’ matter in the Universe? In what seems to be mixing of science and science fiction, a new paper by a team of theoretical physicists hypothesizes the existence of mirror particles as a possible candidate for dark matter. An anomaly observed in the behavior of ordinary particles that appear to oscillate in and out of existence could be from a “hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles,” says a press release from Springer. “Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other.”

{ Universe Today | Continue reading }

photo { Aaron Fowler }

Drug tests spot banned substances based on their specific chemical structures, but a new breed of narcotics is designed to evade such tests. Now researchers have developed a method that can screen for multiple designer drugs at once, without knowing their structures. The test may help law enforcement crack down on the substances.

“Herbal incense” products sold in gas stations and on the internet are typically spiked with synthetic cannabinoids, a class of designer drugs, says Megan Grabenauer of RTI International. When smoked, these compounds produce a high just as their chemical forebear, tetrahydrocannabinol, better known as THC, does. The Drug Enforcement Agency has banned some synthetic cannabinoids, such as JWH-018. But the scientific literature contains recipes for hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids with different, yet related chemical structures. Every time a new test catches one, designer-drug makers can just move on to the next.

{ American Chemical Society | Continue reading }

photo { Garry Winogrand }

If liars betray their true emotions in early, rapid, automatic facial expressions, as some experts have claimed, it would make sense that people who are particularly adept at recognising and processing emotions (one of the hall-marks of emotional intelligence) would therefore have an advantage at spotting deception. […]

The participants performed no better than chance at identifying which clips featured a liar - consistent with past research showing the difficulty of accurate lie detection. However, there was a further paradoxical finding: participants who scored highly on the “emotionality” component of emotional intelligence (pertaining to emotional expression, perception and empathy) were significantly less accurate than average at judging which of the anxious relatives was being genuine.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Jim Goldberg }

An experiment that Sigmund Freud could never have imagined 100 years ago may help lend scientific support for one of his key theories, and help connect it with current neuroscience. […] new data supporting a causal link between the psychoanalytic concept known as unconscious conflict, and the conscious symptoms experienced by people with anxiety disorders such as phobias.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the patient verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst induces the unconscious conflicts causing the patient’s symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.

The specifics of the analyst’s interventions typically include confronting and clarifying the patient’s pathological defenses, wishes and guilt. Through the analysis of conflicts, including those contributing to resistance and those involving transference onto the analyst of distorted reactions, psychoanalytic treatment can hypothesize how patients unconsciously are their own worst enemies: how unconscious, symbolic reactions that have been stimulated by experience are causing symptoms. Its theories have been criticised on numerous fronts including the view that they constitute pseudo-science, but psychoanalysis still has many practitioners of various schools.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Fan Ho, Approaching Shadow, 1954 }

Music is one of the basic human needs for recreation and entertainment. As song files are digitalized now a days, and digital libraries are expanding continuously, which makes it difficult to recall a song. Thus need of a new classification system other than genre is very obvious and mood based classification system serves the purpose very well. In this paper we will present a well-defined architecture to classify songs into different mood-based categories, using audio content analysis, affective value of song lyrics to map a song onto a psychological-based emotion space and information from online sources. In audio content analysis we will use music features such as intensity, timbre and rhythm including their subfeatures to map music in a 2-Dimensional emotional space. In lyric based classification 1-Dimensional emotional space is used. Both the results are merged onto a 2-Dimensional emotional space, which will classify song into a particular mood category. Finally clusters of mood based song files are formed and arranged according to data acquired from various Internet sources.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

artwork { Ruben Nusz }

A paper by Shtulman and Valcarcel argues that even though we know that the earth goes around the sun, we still have hidden away the idea that the sun goes around the earth. Their experiment takes a number of statements about astronomy, evolution, fractions, genetics, germs, matter, mechanics, physiology, thermodynamics, and waves, and asks if they are true. (For example, statements could be ‘the moon goes around the earth’, ‘the sun goes around the earth’.) The speed of answering and the accuracy were compared for statements that have the same validity both scientifically and naïvely, and statements were the validity is different. In all the subject categories the answers were slower and less accurate if there was dissonance between the scientific answer and the naïve one. I assume that neuroscience statements would give the same result, based on the ideas of teleological (design and purpose is found in all things) and animistic (all events are the product of animated intention) bias.

{ thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

Is there a difference between love and addiction? Is being addicted to love a disease? […]

A group of French researchers, publishing in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, describe the clinical distinctions between “love passion,” “love addiction,” and “sex addiction”. Using advances in neurobiology to compare clinical, neuropsychological, neurobiological, and neuroimaging data on love and passion.

They begin with the most pertinent question: “Is there any legitimate reason to associate a pathological condition (addiction) and a natural, pleasurable one [love]?” […]

“Addiction would be defined as the stage where desire becomes a compulsive need, when suffering replaces pleasure, when one persists in the relationship despite knowledge of adverse consequences (including humiliation and shame).”

The fact that there is currently no data on the epidemiology, genetics, co-morbidity, or treatment of love addiction lead the researchers to conclude that to place some cases of “love passion” within a clinical disorder spectrum […] would be premature.

{ science left untitled | Continue reading }