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Can Our Immune Systems Tell Us Who’s Sick?
Discovery News: The placebo effect relies on the mind's ability to influence the body, but does the same work in reverse? For instance, after being sick, can the body's immune system subconsciously tell us who's sick so we can avoid getting sick again? In one early analysis on the topic, researchers think it's certainly possible. The research, featured in the journal Psychological Science, suggests people who recently felt ill are primed to notice and avoid others who appear sick around them. In this sense, their biological immune systems and behavioral immune systems work together in some way to help avoid future illness.
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How Not To Cope With a Personal Insult
Humans have always had to cope with threats, both big and small. The physical and life-threatening threats that our ancestors faced have largely been replaced by social threats, but they are nonetheless an emotional menace: Insults, rejections and criticism can undermine our integrity and self-esteem, even our sense that the world is a meaningful place. Sometimes we cope with these threats smoothly, and other times awkwardly—sometimes disastrously. Is there a single, most effective strategy for dealing with life’s constant battering?
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Watching The World In Motion, Babies Take A First Step Toward Language
Watching children on the playground, we see them run, climb, slide, get up, and do it all again. While their movements are continuous, we language-users can easily divide them up and name each one. But what about people—babies—who don’t yet have words? How do they make sense of a world in motion? An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, finds that infants at seven to nine months are able to slice up the flow of events, even before they start to speak. And the researchers believe they’ve identified the way that babies accomplish this feat.
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Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education: A Proposed Direction Forward Based on Psychological Science
Read the Full Text While promising future athletes and musicians tend to be identified and actively supported from an early age in the United States, the same intense support is not always provided to children who display academic promise – thus hurting the ability of our most talented individuals to compete in the global economy. This major new report explores the reasons for this disconnect, and brings psychological science to bear on the question of how to better nurture young talent across all fields of endeavor. Academic giftedness is often excluded from major conversations on educational policy as a result of misconceptions about what academic giftedness is and how it arises.
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Scientists Hint at Why Laughter Feels So Good
The New York Times: Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good. The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect. His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said.
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Memories you cannot swear by
The Sydney Morning Herald: As the 10-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York passed last weekend, many people paused to remember where they were at the moment of the attacks. Most people have a story; watching late-night television news, holidaying overseas and wondering where the next attack might be, rushing to tell friends of the disaster. These types of "flashbulb" memories are the most vivid in our minds. But what if something we feel as such a vivid memory could be a fiction? Research is starting to show that false memories are more common than most people think.
