Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • Validation vs Correctness

    In order to avoid cognitive dissonance you have a number of choices. Primarily: selective exposure and/or confirmation bias. Researchers from a number of US universities are now attempting to quantify these phenomena, looking at how we seek validation as opposed to correctness. The researchers found that people are about twice as likely to select information that supports their…

  • The Benefits of Child Bilingualism

    Outside of the UK, bilingualism (or even trilingualism+) is the norm in Europe and, in some countries and/or regions, even expected. With that said, The Economist takes a look at the effect bilingualism has on a child’s brain. Monitoring languages and keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that…

  • Traffic Psychology and The Commuters Paradox

    There aren’t many people, I believe, who are able to drive and who are not interested in traffic dynamics. Jonah Lehrer, in a recent column for Seed, takes a brief look at traffic psychology; including ‘the commuters paradox’ and the ‘critical density’. They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of…

  • Cognitive Benefits of Exercise

    Walter van den Broek (AKA Dr Shock) provides a summary of the research on the neuroscience of exercise, or: the cognitive benefits of an active lifestyle. Exercise… improves learning and intelligence scores. increases the resilience of the brain in later life resulting in a cognitive reserve. [attenuates] the decline of memory, cortex and hippocampus atrophy…

  • Body Language Mimicry

    It is said that mimicking a person’s body language helps to create false camaraderie–a manufacturing of attraction, if you will. Conventional wisdom holds that this is because it helps you, the mimicker, empathise. This is false, recent research shows, but not far off; face and body motion mimicry actually “helps you to see them as they…

  • The Evolutionary Grounds for Depression

    Depression is an emotional response that has evolved to prevent us from experiencing mentally damaging events, a number of recent studies are starting to suggest. As pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and…

  • Female Sexuality Research: What Women Want

    The question ‘What does a woman want?’ was, according to Freud, “The great question that has never been answered”. One person trying to answer this question, however, is Meredith Chivers—a psychologist specialising in sexual behaviour whose work was extensively discussed in The New York Times earlier this year. The article, focusing on female sexuality, is…

  • How Language Affects Thinking

    Linguistic relativity is the idea that language differences alone can affect how we perceive world experiences and thus can cause us to behave differently. In an Edge essay, Lera Boroditsky discusses some of her research into linguistic relativity and how language use (grammar, word choice and language itself) vastly alters our perceptions and thought processes, offering…

  • The Perils of Pop Psychology

    In response to Jane O’Grady’s Open Democracy article critiquing the ‘neuro-social-sciences’, Julian Sanchez outlines his thoughts on the perils of pop psychology: There are arguments that simply can’t be made in the span of even a longish newspaper or magazine article. If one is writing for a lay audience, in fact, I feel pretty confident that…

  • Body Language and Our Egocentric Blind Spot

    BPS Research Digest reports on a study illustrating our apparent inability to read insights into our personalities from watching a video of our own body language. We are, however, quite adept at making revealing insights on others from similar videos, suggesting we have a sort of “egocentric blind spot”. Why can’t we use a video…