New Scientist: Why cockiness counts for more than expertise

US News & World Report: The Whole World is Optimistic, Survey Finds

Psychcentral.com: Lies, Lies, Lies

Science Magazine: A Shake May Prevent  A Crash

USA Today: All the rage in baby names: What’s unusual

Time/CNN: Competitive Altruism: Being Green in Public

Gerd Gigerenzer supplied several examples of how and why statistics are misinterpreted by doctors and patients and explained the impact this “statistical illiteracy” has on the understanding of diagnoses and treatment. “Much of the understanding comes from outside in the way information is being presented,” he explained. This is the basis for Gigerenzer’s research: in order for patients to fully understand their risks, the doctors need to be educated on how to interpret accurately and to explain health statistics.

As Timothy Baker explained, proper healthcare should include mental health as well, and unfortunately, it doesn’t always. The good news, Baker imparted, is that clinical psychology can weather a change toward a more scientifically-based approach to therapy. “The bad news is that we are not making these cases to the stakeholders, the clinical psychologists who are out here making these cases,” he said. Baker suggested an alternative accreditation system, one that monitored the effectiveness of therapy using empirical research, one that APS is already sponsoring, the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (www.pcsas.org).

-Katie Kline

As we find out more about the brain and the processes that underlie the smallest of behaviors, we gain a better sense of humanity. Farah enthusiastically suggests that this gives us a unique opportunity to change the way our society currently operates. By incorporating a “neuroscience worldview” into our lives, we can adapt concrete scientific results into our education and legal systems. In fact, Farah presented recent evidence that brain scans can predict when a child may be ready to start reading. Those results coupled with the teacher’s behavioral approaches may alleviate the anxiety that arises with late readers. 

For the more spiritual among us, reducing a human to a completely physical system may conflict with the idea that our soul operates as a separate entity inside our brain, what Arthur Koestler has called “the ghost in the machine.” However, she encourages us to assimilate this worldview into our lives without devaluing humanity and the value of life. “I think we can do this without becoming nihilists,” she concluded.

-Catherine Allen-West

Numerous studies have shown that increased anxiety can lead to increased risk for psychological disorders and myriad other health problems. Using a combination of pharmacological, imaging, and molecular genetics research techniques, Ahmed Hariri and his colleagues have worked to map the chain of events controlling serotonin’s role in the amygdala’s arousal response to stress and the subsequent prefrontal cortex’s response to bring the system back to its normal state. By understanding this system from the molecular genetics to the experienced anxiety, we may be able to identify and manipulate specific pathways to lessen the risk of stress-related illness.

Cornelius Gross and his colleagues at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory have also investigated environmental interactions with genetic markers controlling serotonin production and, hence, reactions to stressful events. They have developed a mouse model where certain serotonin related genetic variations ameliorate the negative effects of both early and adult life stress.  

While mice provide a very useful manipulatable model, Steve Cole has been endeavoring to understand the wider implications of social stress on the human genome. Cole’s own research has shown that being socially inhibited is related to a quicker progression of HIV. He discussed related research showing that many social stressors, from loneliness to sleep deprivation, affect gene transcription across the body.  But, like in the mouse model, certain genes also appear to confer resilience to negative environments, pointing to the human body’s continually fascinating self-preservation mechanisms.

-Ann Conkle

Anne Treisman and Eleanor Maccoby spoke next, providing fascinating overviews of how their careers have evolved. Treisman admitted that she was pretty lucky (mainly due to timing) and did not experience too much gender discrimination during her career. However, she did offer an example of a sexist incident: Early in her career, she was lecturing to a group of doctors. Following her talk (which she thought went pretty well), during the question session, she was asked, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in psychology?”  Maccoby began by describing her family life, including that her “mother was a folk singer, with a guitar, from the time she was 17,” and described how she ended up in psychology. Like Treisman, Maccoby did not really feel discriminated against for being a woman; her focus was to do good science. She mentioned that she “did not want to be a role model, just because I’m a woman.”

The audience was riveted by the fascinating panel of psychology greats and sorely disappointed when the session was over.

-Barbara Isanski

Dr. Gray recognizes that humans make errors. While talking on a cell phone when driving is not safe, it is normal behavior. “The problem is not the driver, but the roadway/vehicle/driver system,” he said.A wide range of solutions were offered to correct the driver system and studies showing the benefits of collision warning signals were presented. Still, Dr. Gray’s closing picture of a man talking widely on a cell phone during a near fender bender reminded us all “not to be that guy.”

-Christina Smith

Morgenson focused on the nature of the team leader. Events challenge teams and leaders by creating uncertainty and disrupting routines. He discussed how events and challenges affect teams, and noted the difficulty in knowing when and how leaders should intervene. 

-Bob Nolan

In a related symposium also sponsored by NIA on new interventions for productive aging, researchers Denise Park, Cindy Lustig, Arthur Kramer, and Elizabeth Stine-Morrow  presented an array of intervention research projects, on cognitive training and physical exercise to broad lifestyle enrichment, that could have major public health implications.  There are lots of products on the market that promise to promote better cognitive functioning, but the trick is transfer – does improvement in one specific skill transfer to similar gains in others?  In many instances it doesn’t, but there’s much promising research into new interventions that attempt to do just that.  The highlight of the session was the special guest of honor, speaker Arthur Kramer’s 89-year-old aunt, a retired biochemistry professor at UC Berkeley, who Kramer bragged was the “perfect example of productive aging.”

-Amy Pollick

Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology presented evidence that people with amygdala lesions use different facial areas to determine whether an expression is threatening than do healthy controls. Healthy controls focus on the eyes, where people with amygdala damage focus on the mouth. Interestingly, people with autism perform equally well as controls despite using the mouth region. Eye-tracking studies indicate that autistics look at both the mouth and eyes, perhaps because of two competing processes: a natural tendency to look at the mouth area and social training to make eye contact.

Princeton’s Alex Todorov took a different approach. He showed that many, if not all, emotional displays are evaluated for trustworthiness and dominance. People judge trustworthiness based on approachability and dominance based on features signaling physical strength.

Kevin Oschner of Columbia both chaired the session and contributed a unique perspective. He described an experiment designed to test whether empathic accuracy depended on both the empathy of the observer and the expressiveness of the target. High “affect sharing” was related to accuracy only for expressive targets. He discussed several real-world uses, including predicting relationship outcomes, measuring social impairments, and examining social enhancers.

-Bob Nolan