Laura’s Psychology Blog

Research and presentations never stop with a team member in Dalian, China. My daughter Karen is an invited speaker!

Here are my readings for today:

• IQ and baby’s weight gain!

“”Head circumference is an indicator of brain volume, so a greater increase in head circumference in a newborn baby suggests more rapid brain growth,” says the lead author of the study, Dr Lisa Smithers from the University of Adelaide’s School of Population Health.

“Overall, newborn children who grew faster in the first four weeks had higher IQ scores later in life,” she says.”

• pollution and autism

“”Our findings raise concerns since, depending on the pollutant, 20% to 60% of the women in our study lived in areas where risk of autism was elevated,” said lead author Andrea Roberts, research associate in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The study appeared online June 18, 2013 inEnvironmental Health Perspectives.”

• news about toddler’s speech

“Dr Cristina Dye, a lecturer in child language development, found that two to three- year-olds are using grammar far sooner than expected.

She studied fifty French speaking youngsters aged between 23 and 37 months, capturing tens of thousands of their utterances.

Dr Dye, who carried out the research while at Cornell University in the United States, found that the children were using ‘little words’ which form the skeleton of sentences such as a, an, can, is, an, far sooner than previously thought.”

• your waking hours affects your quality of sleep

“This study supports the idea that subjective sleepiness is influenced by the quality of experiences right before bedtime. Are you reluctantly awake or excited to be awake?” said Dr. Masashi Yanagisawa, professor of molecular genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UT Southwestern. He is principal author of the study published online in May in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

• does a robot cat leave little batteries behind??

“The latest addition to the growing field of fast four-legged robots is no bigger than a housecat, yet it can tackle more realistic terrain than its larger predecessors. Three years in the making, “Cheetah-cub” runs about 5 kilometers per hour and can descend steps up to 20% its leg length. For its size—23 centimeters long and 1 kilogram in weight—it may be a record-holder among other robo-quadrupeds, its developers say, attaining speeds seven times its body length per second. It even has an advantage over real cats: It runs with no brain telling it what to do.”

• the new reality for college age students: more work and less fun

“BOSTON, MA–(Marketwired – Jun 18, 2013) – Lazy, self-absorbed and entitled? Practical, heads-down and resourceful might be more accurate descriptors for today’s College Millennial Consumers (CMCs), according to a new survey of 1,600+ U.S. college students. The survey was conducted May 13-20, 2013 by fluent, a Boston-based College Millennial Consumer marketing agency (www.fluentgrp.com).

Specializing in “translating brands for the college world,” fluent works with clients who want to understand and engage College Millennial Consumers (CMCs) nationwide, both on- and off-campus. Clients have included major brands such as Microsoft, Macy’s, PacSun, Zipcar, Sun Drop, Kotex, Dove and L’Oreal. Building on an exclusive affiliation with the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), fluent has insider access to nearly 1,000 colleges and universities and engages students in a variety of brand experiences that complement everyday college life.”

• How college students will be spending their summers (INFOGRAPHIC)

Part of the Research Team on their own time in Europe!

Here is what I am reading today:

• sleep and memory of emotion

“Their findings have implications for individuals suffering from insomnia related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other anxiety disorders who are prescribed zolpidem (Ambien) to help them sleep.

The study—”Pharmacologically Increasing Sleep Spindles Enhances Recognition for Negative and High-arousal Memories”—appears in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. It was funded by a National Institutes of Health career award to Sara C. Mednick, assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside, of $651,999 over five years.”

• the brain’s recovery after stroke

“”This study may have solved one of those mysteries by showing how certain stem cells play a role in the brain’s ability to heal itself to differing degrees after stroke or other trauma,” says study author Michael Chopp, Ph.D., scientific director of the Henry Ford Neuroscience Institute and vice chairman of the department of Neurology at Henry Ford Hospital.”

• beer goggles?

“Hot? Or not? The lightning-quick spark that triggers desire when you see an attractive face is kindled within a deep brain region called the ventral midbrain, associated with processing reward. Now, researchers have discovered a way to stoke that fire with 2 milliamps of electrical current. Using a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which passes current through the brain between two electrodes on the scalp, the team asked 19 volunteers to rate the attractiveness of two sets of computer-generated male and female Caucasian faces with neutral expressions (examples above) before and after the activity in their ventral midbrains ramped up.”

• sperm never forgets

“Now, a team of researchers led by Tracy L. Bale, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and the School of Veterinary Medicine Department of Animal Biology have shown that stress on preadolescent and adult male mice induced an epigenetic mark in their sperm that reprogrammed their offspring’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a region of the brain that governs responses to stress. Surprisingly, both male and female offspring had abnormally low reactivity to stress.”

• we have a built in censor

“It was a summer evening when Tony Cornell tried to make the residents of Cambridge, England see a ghost. He got dressed up in a sheet and walked through a public park waving his arms about. Meanwhile his assistants observed the bystanders for any hint that they noticed something strange. No, this wasn’t Candid Camera. Cornell was a researcher interested in the paranormal. The idea was first to get people to notice the spectacle, and then see how they understood what their eyes were telling them. Would they see the apparition as a genuine ghost or as something more mundane, like a bloke in a bed sheet?

The plan was foiled when not a single bystander so much as raised an eye brow. Several cows did notice, however, and they followed Cornell on his ghostly rambles. Was it just a fluke, or did people “not want to see” the besheeted man, as Cornell concluded in his 1959 report?

Okay, that stunt was not a very good experiment, but twenty years later the eminent psychologist Ulric Neisser did a better job.”

My daughters are in Paris after attending a convention on the research team’s work. What better way to add to the fun than take a cooking class!

Here is my reading for today:

• practice makes perfect

“Not only from our daily experience but from learning experiments in animals, we know that the establishment of long-lasting memory requires repeated practice. However, cellular backgrounds underlying this repetition-dependent consolidation of memory remain largely unclear. We reported previously using organotypic slice cultures of rodent hippocampus that the repeated inductions of LTP (long-term potentiation) lead to a slowly developing long-lasting synaptic enhancement accompanied by synaptogenesis distinct from LTP itself, and proposed this phenomenon as a model system suitable for the analysis of the repetition-dependent consolidation of memory. Here we examined the dynamics of individual dendritic spines after repeated LTP-inductions and found the existence of two phases in the spines’ stochastic behavior that eventually lead to the increase in spine density. This spine dynamics occurred preferentially in the dendritic segments having low pre-existing spine density. Our results may provide clues for understanding the cellular bases underlying the repetition-dependent consolidation of memory.”

• people think they know more than they do

“The research, conducted by researchers Albert Mannes of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Don Moore of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted their estimates in response to feedback about their accuracy and to the costs of being wrong. “The findings suggest that people are too confident in what they know and underestimate what they don’t know,” says Mannes.”

• mapping the brain for long term memory

“Led by Gladstone Senior Investigator Steve Finkbeiner, MD, PhD, this research delved deep into the inner workings of synapses. Synapses are the highly specialized junctions that process and transmit information between neurons. Most of the synapses our brain will ever have are formed during early brain development, but throughout our lifetimes these synapses can be made, broken and strengthened. Synapses that are more active become stronger, a process that is essential for forming new memories. However, this process is also dangerous, as it can overstimulate the neurons and lead to epileptic seizures. It must therefore be kept in check.”

• young adults dating trends

“The study, “We’re not living together: Stayover relationships among college-educated emerging adults,” is in the current issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Jamison recommends future research to determine the effect of stayovers on marriage and divorce rates. Her follow-up research is focused on stayover relationships in unmarried parents. She is a doctoral candidate in the MU College of Human Environmental Sciences.”

When watching the “Game of Thrones”, one must keep warm with pelts.

• gestures of apes and babies

“”The similarity in the form and function of the gestures in a human infant, a baby chimpanzee and a baby bonobo was remarkable,” said Patricia Greenfield, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and co-author of the study, published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.”

• faces of success

“This is the finding of research by Professor Jamie Ward and Shuaa Alrajih and from the University of Sussex that will be published in the British Journal of Psychology on 7 June.”

• boosting baby’s brain growth through breastfeeding

“This isn’t the first study to suggest that breastfeeding aids babies’ brain development. Behavioral studies have previously associated breastfeeding with better cognitive outcomes in older adolescents and adults. But this is the first imaging study that looked for differences associated with breastfeeding in the brains of very young and healthy children, said Sean Deoni, assistant professor of engineering at Brown and the study’s lead author.”

• why are you compulsive?

“”You don’t have to stimulate all the time. You can do it in a very nuanced way,” says Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of a Science paper describing the study.”

• cognitive ability and brain cortical thickness

“Associations between brain cortical tissue volume and cognitive function in old age are frequently interpreted as suggesting that preservation of cortical tissue is the foundation of successful cognitive aging.”

• babies practice facial expressions… before they are born

“The researchers from Durham and Lancaster Universities suggest that fetuses’ ability to show a “pain” facial expression is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors another index of the health of a fetus. The study is published in the prestigious academic journal, PLOS ONE, and was part funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Durham University.”

• mushroom clouds and our brains

“For a long time, scientific dogma held that our brains did not produce new neurons during adulthood, says Pasko Rakic, a neuroscientist at Yale University who was not involved in the study.”

• compulsive behavior treated in the lab

“Brain scanning in humans with OCD has pointed to two areas — the orbitofrontal cortex, just behind the eyes, and the striatum, a hub in the middle of the brain — as being involved in the condition’s characteristic repetitive and compulsive behaviors. But “in people we have no way of testing cause and effect”, says Susanne Ahmari, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York who led one of the studies.”

Do you remember when this game first came out? Well, most college students weren’t even born yet.

Here is what I am reading today:

• meeting on-line can lead to happier and more enduring relationships

“Although the study did not determine why relationships that started online were more successful, the reasons may include the strong motivations of online daters, the availability of advance screening, and the sheer volume of opportunities online. “These data suggest that the Internet may be altering the dynamics and outcomes of marriage itself,” said the study’s lead author, John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago. ”

• perspective is everything

“When people learn to do a task well, but are asked to keep doing it while receiving deliberately misleading feedback indicating that their performance is perfect every time, their actual performance will gradually get worse.

It had been assumed that the decline was due to the decay of memories in the absence of reinforcement, says Reza Shadmehr, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.”

• the relief of anxiety through … meditation

“”Although we’ve known that meditation can reduce anxiety, we hadn’t identified the specific brain mechanisms involved in relieving anxiety in healthy individuals,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., postdoctoral research fellow in neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and lead author of the study. “In this study, we were able to see which areas of the brain were activated and which were deactivated during meditation-related anxiety relief.”"

• OCD in dogs and people

““While the study sample was small and further research is needed, the results further validate that dogs with CCD (Canine Compulsive Disorder) can provide insight and understanding into anxiety disorders that affect people,” Nicholas Dodman, a professor of clinical sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University who worked on the study, said in a press release.”

• having sex changes your brain… if you are a vole

“The results, published in Nature Neuroscience today, provide the first direct evidence of  the link between epigenetics and monogamous bonding in voles. The results could have implications for other types of neurotransmitter-related behaviors or for bonding in other apparently monogamous species, like humans. Just don’t expect a love drug for your significant other anytime soon.”

• if you smile you lose

“Facial expressions have long been thought to be reliable indicators of a person’s true feelings. Indeed, in his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” Darwin suggested that such expressions have evolved precisely because they serve this important function.”

• glowing plants

“He and his colleagues — Omri Amirav-Drory, founder of synthetic-biology software firm Genome Compiler in Berkeley, California, and Kyle Taylor, a former biology graduate student at Stanford University in California — set out to make Arabidopsis glow because the feat seemed achievable in a simple garage lab. “There are some people in synthetic-biology circles who would yawn at what we’re doing,” Evans says.”

• designer stimulants

“Recent high-profile incidents have drawn attention to “bath salts” as a new and potentially hazardous type of recreational drug. Addiction medicine specialist Dr Erik W. Gunderson of University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and colleagues, review available data on the use and effects of these designer drugs in this issue of JAM. The paper provides a timely update including implications for medical management and drug policy.”

• are cheerful women perceived as good leaders??

“To increase their share of leadership positions, women are expected to tick a range of boxes — usually demonstrating improved negotiation skills, networking strengths and the ability to develop a strategic career ladder. “But even these skills are not enough,” maintains Professor Isabell Welpe of TUM’s Chair for Strategy and Organization. “They ignore the fact that there are stereotypes that on a subconscious level play a decisive role in the assessment of high achievers. Leaders should be assertive, dominant and hard-lined; women are seen as mediators, friendly, social.”"

• remembering a face, who does it better? men or women?

“”The way we move our eyes across a new individual’s face affects our ability to recognize that individual later,” explains Jennifer Heisz, a research fellow at the Rotman Institute at Baycrest and newly appointed assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University.

She co-authored the paper with David Shore, psychology professor at McMaster and psychology graduate student Molly Pottruff.

“Our findings provide new insights into the potential mechanisms of episodic memory and the differences between the sexes. We discovered that women look more at new faces than men do, which allows them to create a richer and more superior memory,” Heisz says.”