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Too much coffee and stress can lead to hallucinations, La Trobe University study warns
Herald Sun: A La Trobe University study has found stressed people who have consumed five cups of coffee can exhibit signs of hallucination. Professor Simon Crowe from the School of Psychological Sciences examined the effect of stress and caffeine on 92 participants. Prof Crowe found stressed people who had consumed about 200mg of caffeine during the day were more likely to imagine hearing things. "What we did is we brought people into the lab while listening to White Christmas and then told them we were going to play some white noise," he told mX. Read more: Herald Sun
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Both mind and body play key role in problem solving
Yahoo India: A new study has confirmed that not only the brain, but other body parts also play a significant role in problem solving. "Being able to use your body in problem solving alters the way you solve the problems," said Martha Alibali, psychology professor at University of Wisconsin. "Body movements are one of the resources we bring to cognitive processes," she added. To confirm their findings, researchers recruited 86 American undergraduates, half of whom were prevented from moving their hands and the others were prevented from moving their feet. Read more: Yahoo India
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News in Brief: Association for Psychological Science meeting
ScienceNews: Familiarity breeds congeniality Snap judgments about others sometimes depend not on what the person looks like but on whom they look like. Women tend to preferentially like male strangers who facially resemble the woman’s romantic partner, psychologist Gül Günaydin of Cornell University reported May 27. This type of social attraction often occurs unconsciously, Günaydin’s team found. For unclear reasons, men showed no signs of especially liking women who resembled a romantic partner. Members of 30 romantic couples observed opposite-sex strangers’ faces for half a second on a computer screen. Some faces were digitally altered to resemble the volunteers’ partners.
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El ejercicio mental que de verdad aumenta la inteligencia
ABC Espana: Ni autodefinidos, ni sudokus, ni música de Mozart ni lo último en complicados juegos electrónicos. La mejor manera de entrenar nuestro cerebro para aumentar realmente nuestra inteligencia es un pequeño ejercicio llamado «entrenamiento n-back», según concluye un estudio de la Universidad de Michigan. Básicamente, la tarea consiste en recordar las posiciones de una figura que se mueve de forma cíclica en una pantalla, y los investigadores aseguran que su práctica 20 minutos diarios durante 20 días mejora los resultados en una prueba de inteligencia. Al parecer, aumenta la capacidad de razonar y de resolver nuevos problemas, una mejoría que se prolonga al menos durante tres meses.
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Feel Great, Meditate
We all know that levitating off the ground when you meditate is just a myth, but there is lots of scientific research to back-up the idea that meditation can improve our lives. At the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Katherine MacLean of the University of California, Davis, Bethany Kok of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Catherine Ortner of Thompson Rivers University in Canada, and Matthew Hunsinger from Mary Baldwin College led a symposia on the affective, cognitive, and social benefits of meditation.
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News from Psychological Science: A Conversation Between David Brooks and Walter Mischel
David Brooks is a featured New York Times columnist and a regular on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In his NY Times columns "Social Science Palooza" I and II, he summarized examples of recent findings in the scholarly study of human behavior and concluded, "A day without social science is like a day without sunshine." In this conversation hour, Brooks and social psychology legend Walter Mischel talked about what's exciting them in psychological science and why it matters outside the academy.
