readings in psychology for january 8 2011

Seeing my daughter Karen off to Tennessee today!

Here are a few stories for today:

• vaccine blocks cocaine high in mice!

“Researchers have produced a lasting anti-cocaine immunity in mice by giving them a safe vaccine that combines bits of the common cold virus with a particle that mimics cocaine.”

• denzel washington and neuroscience

“Washington also established the Pauletta and Denzel Washington Family Gifted Scholars Program in Neuroscience, named after him and his wife. Awards are given to students pursuing careers in neuroscience and are presented by the Washington family, including his children John, David, Katia, Olivia and Malcolm.”

• oh green tea protect me!

“Regularly drinking green tea could protect the brain against developing Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, according to latest research by scientists at Newcastle University.”

• perception of our own heartbeat

“A new study, led by Dr Manos Tsakiris from Royal Holloway, University of London, suggests that the way we experience the internal state of our body may also influence how we perceive our body from the outside, as for example in the mirror.”

• that which is chemically encoded in tears

“Emotional crying is a universal, uniquely human behavior. When we cry, we clearly send all sorts of emotional signals. In a paper published online January 6 in Science Express, scientists at the Weizmann Institute have demonstrated that some of these signals are chemically encoded in the tears themselves. Specifically, they found that merely sniffing a woman’s tears — even when the crying woman is not present — reduces sexual arousal in men.”

• border collies and name recognition

“Researchers at Wofford College discovered that a border collie comprehends the names of over 1,000 objects, differentiating between names of objects and orders to fetch them. This research deepens the findings of researchers in Germany, who had discovered a dog that knew the names of a couple of hundred objects. Important questions were left open as to how far a dog could go, and whether the dog really understood that the object names were nouns and not commands to retrieve the object.”