How We Make Emotional Decisions
Cambridge, MA; May 28, 2015—Some decisions arouse far more anxiety than others. Among the most anxiety-provoking are those that involve options with both positive and negative elements, such choosing to take a higher-paying job in a city far from family and friends, versus choosing to stay put with less pay.
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New Super-Fast MRI Technique Views Images at 100 Frames per Second
Demonstrated with Song 'If I Only Had a Brain'
April 21, 2015—In order to sing or speak, around one hundred different muscles in our chest, neck, jaw, tongue, and lips must work together to produce sound. Beckman researchers investigate how all these mechanisms effortlessly work together—and how they change over time.
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Predicting Consumer Preferences? Do NOT Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
February 25, 2015—Salespeople have long believed that by imagining themselves as the customer, they can steer clear of their own personal preferences and make decisions that will appeal to consumers in general. According to a new study in the Journal of Marketing Research, the reality is exactly the opposite.
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The Brain's Social Network: Nerve Cells Interact like Friends on Facebook
February 4, 2015—Neurons in the brain are wired like a social network, report researchers from Biozentrum, University of Basel. Each nerve cell has links with many others, but the strongest bonds form between the few cells most similar to each other. The results are published in the journal Nature.
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Why 'I'm so Happy I Could Cry' Makes Sense
New Haven, CT; November 11, 2014—The phrase "tears of joy" never made much sense to Yale psychologist Oriana Aragon. But after conducting a series of studies of such seemingly incongruous expressions, she now understands better why people cry when they are happy.
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New Knowledge about the Human Brain's Plasticity
November 6, 2014—The brain's plasticity and its adaptability to new situations do not function the way researchers previously thought, according to a new study published in the journal Cell. Earlier theories are based on laboratory animals, but now researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have studied the human brain. The results show that a type of support cell, the oligodendrocyte, which plays an important role in the cell-cell communication in the nervous system, is more sophisticated in humans than in rats and mice—a fact that may contribute to the superior plasticity of the human brain.
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Daydreaming Can Help Boost Mental Performance
October 23, 2014—New research led by Cornell University neuroscientist Nathan Spreng shows for the first time that engaging brain areas linked to so-called “off-task” mental activities (such as mind-wandering and reminiscing) can actually boost performance on some challenging mental tasks. The results advance our understanding of how externally and internally focused neural networks interact to facilitate complex thought, the authors say.
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Reacting to Personal Setbacks: Do You Bounce Back or Give Up?
Rutgers researchers find the ability to persist may depend on how the news is delivered
September 4, 2014—Sometimes when people get upsetting news—such as a failing exam grade or a negative job review—they decide instantly to do better the next time. In other situations that are equally disappointing, the same people may feel inclined to just give up.
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Our Brains Judge a Face's Trustworthiness—Even When We Can't See It
August 5, 2014—Our brains are able to judge the trustworthiness of a face even when we cannot consciously see it, a team of scientists has found. Their findings, which appear in the Journal of Neuroscience, shed new light on how we form snap judgments of others.
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Teaching the Brain to Reduce Pain
July 10, 2014—People can be conditioned to feel less pain when they hear a neutral sound, new research from the University of Luxembourg has found. This lends weight to the idea that we can learn to use mind-over-matter to beat pain. The scientific article was published recently in the online journal PLOS One.
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Study Cracks How the Brain Processes Emotions
July 9, 2014—Although feelings are personal and subjective, the human brain turns them into a standard code that objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people, reports a new study by Cornell University neuroscientist Adam Anderson.
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Does Practice Make Perfect? Or Are Some People More Creative than Others? If so, Why?
Study finds brain integration correlates with greater creativity in product-development engineers
June 4, 2014—Creativity may depend on greater brain integration, according to a new study published in Creativity Research Journal. Scientists refer to brain integration as mind-brain development. People with high mind-brain development are alert, interested in learning new things and disposed to see the whole picture. They think in wide circles and are emotionally stable and unselfish.
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No Such Thing as a 'Universal' Intelligence Test
Cultural Differences Determine Results Country by Country
May 13, 2014—Researchers at the University of Granada have shown that a universal test of intelligence quotient (IQ) does not exist. Results in this type of test are determined by cultural differences.
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Scientists Discover Brain's Anti-Distraction System
April 17, 2014—Two Simon Fraser University psychologists have made a brain-related discovery that could revolutionize doctors’ perception and treatment of attention-deficit disorders.
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New Evidence Confirms IQ Is Not Static: Change is Linked to Brain Cortex Thickness
Montreal scientists play key role in long-term international study
March 4, 2014—Rate of change in the thickness of the brain’s cortex is an important factor associated with a person’s change in IQ, according to a collaborative study by scientists in five countries including researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre. The study has potentially wide-ranging implications for the pedagogical world and for judicial cases in which the defendant’s IQ score could play a role in determining the severity of the sentence.
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'Beautiful but Sad' Music Can Help People Feel Better
February 19, 2014—New research from psychologists at the universities of Kent and Limerickhas found that music that is felt to be 'beautiful but sad' can help people feel better when they're feeling blue.
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Study Reveals Workings of Working Memory
PROVIDENCE, RI; February 19, 2014—Keep this in mind: Scientists say they've learned how your brain plucks information out of working memory when you decide to act.
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Mindfulness Meditation May Improve Decision Making
February 12, 2014—One 15-minute focused-breathing meditation may help people make smarter choices, according to new research from researchers at INSEAD and The Wharton School. The findings are published in the February issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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“False" Memories: the Hidden Side of Our Good Memory
February 5, 2014—Justice blindly trusts human memory. Every year throughout the world hundreds of thousands of court cases are heard based solely on the testimony of somebody who swears that they are reproducing exactly an event that they witnessed in a more or less not too distant past. Nevertheless, various recent studies in cognitive neuroscience indicate both the strengths and weaknesses in this ability of recall of the human brain.
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For Athletes, There's No Place like Home
But it's not all good news . . .
February 4, 2014—The pomp. The pageantry. The exciting wins and devastating losses. Unbelievable feats of athleticism and sheer determination. That's right—it's time for the winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Everyone has their picks for who will take gold medals and we're likely to see some unexpected upsets. But there are certain athletes that may have a leg up on everyone else: the Russians. Unless, of course, they succumb to some of the disadvantages of being on home turf.
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Your Brain Is Fine-Tuning Its Wiring throughout Your Life
Researchers evaluate white matter across the life span
Philadelphia, PA, February 3, 2014—The white matter microstructure, the communication pathways of the brain, continues to develop/mature as one ages. Studies link age-related differences in white matter microstructure to specific cognitive abilities in childhood and adulthood.
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Altruistic Acts More Common in States With High Well-Being
January 29, 2014—People are much more likely to decide to donate a kidney to a stranger—an extraordinarily altruistic act—in areas of the United States where levels of well-being are high, according to a new study.
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Psychologists Document the Age Our Earliest Memories Fade
January 24, 2014—Although infants use their memories to learn new information, few adults can remember events in their lives that happened prior to the age of three. Psychologists at Emory University have now documented that age seven is when these earliest memories tend to fade into oblivion, a phenomenon known as “childhood amnesia.”
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Fast Eye Movements: A Possible Indicator Of More Impulsive Decision-Making
January 21, 2014—Using a simple study of eye movements, Johns Hopkins scientists report evidence that people who are less patient tend to move their eyes with greater speed. The findings, the researchers say, suggest that the weight people give to the passage of time may be a trait consistently used throughout their brains, affecting the speed with which they make movements, as well as the way they make certain decisions.
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Older Brains Slow Due to Greater Experience, Rather than Cognitive Decline
January 21, 2014—What happens to our cognitive abilities as we age? Traditionally it is thought that age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function, but new research in Topics in Cognitive Science argues that older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, and this has often been misidentified as declining capacity.
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Brain Structure Shows Who Is Most Sensitive to Pain
WINSTON-SALEM, NC; January 14, 2014—Everybody feels pain differently, and brain structure may hold the clue to these differences. In a study published in the current online issue of the journal Pain, scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have shown that the brain's structure is related to how intensely people perceive pain.
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It's All Coming Back to Me Now: Researchers Find Caffeine Enhances Memory
January 12, 2014—For some, it's the tradition of steeping tea leaves to brew the perfect cup of tea. For others, it's the morning shuffle to a coffee maker for a hot jolt of java. Then there are those who like their wake up with the kind of snap and a fizz usually found in a carbonated beverage.
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Some Brain Regions Retain Enhanced Ability to Make New Connections
January 7, 2014—In adults, some brain regions retain a "childlike" ability to establish new connections, potentially contributing to our ability to learn new skills and form new memories as we age, according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
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Epigenetics Enigma Resolved
First structure of enzyme that removes methylation
December 25, 2013—Scientists have obtained the first detailed molecular structure of a member of the Tet family of enzymes. The finding is important for the field of epigenetics because Tet enzymes chemically modify DNA, changing signposts that tell the cell's machinery "this gene is shut off" into other signs that say "ready for a change."
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Do Patients in a Vegetative State Recognize Loved Ones?
TAU researchers find unresponsive patients' brains may recognize photographs of their family and friends
December 16, 2013—Patients in a vegetative state are awake, breathe on their own, and seem to go in and out of sleep. But they do not respond to what is happening around them and exhibit no signs of conscious awareness. With communication impossible, friends and family are left wondering if the patients even know they are there. Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Dr. Haggai Sharon and Dr. Yotam Pasternak of Tel Aviv University's Functional Brain Center and Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center have shown that the brains of patients in a vegetative state emotionally react to photographs of people they know personally as though they recognize them.
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Money May Corrupt, but Thinking about Time Can Strengthen Morality
December 10, 2013—Priming people to think about money makes them more likely to cheat, but priming them to think about time seems to strengthen their moral compass, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
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No Pictures, Please: Taking Photos May Impede Memory of Museum Tour
December 9, 2013—Visit a museum these days and you'll see people using their smartphones and cameras to take pictures of works of art, archeological finds, historical artifacts, and any other object that strikes their fancy. While taking a picture might seem like a good way to preserve the moment, new research suggests that museum-goers may want to put their cameras down.
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Study Reveals Gene Expression Changes with Meditation
Dec. 6, 2013—With evidence growing that meditation can have beneficial health effects, scientists have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body.
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