Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
A Specific and Rapid Neural Signature for Parental Instinct
1 Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 3 Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America, 4 Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, 5 The Wellcome Trust Laboratory for MEG Studies, School of Life and Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 6 School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 7 Department of Psychology, York University, York, United Kingdom, 8 Department of Neurosurgery, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, United Kingdom, 9 Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Abstract
Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them, in order to increase individual fitness, i.e. reproductive success, via increased survivorship of one's own offspring. Lorenz proposed that it is the specific structure of the infant face that serves to elicit these parental responses, but the biological basis for this remains elusive. Here, we investigated whether adults show specific brain responses to unfamiliar infant faces compared to adult faces, where the infant and adult faces had been carefully matched across the two groups for emotional valence and arousal, as well as size and luminosity. The faces also matched closely in terms of attractiveness. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in adults, we found that highly specific brain activity occurred within a seventh of a second in response to unfamiliar infant faces but not to adult faces. This activity occurred in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), an area implicated in reward behaviour, suggesting for the first time a neural basis for this vital evolutionary process. We found a peak in activity first in mOFC and then in the right fusiform face area (FFA). In mOFC the first significant peak (p<0.001) in differences in power between infant and adult faces was found at around 130 ms in the 10–15 Hz band. These early differences were not found in the FFA. In contrast, differences in power were found later, at around 165 ms, in a different band (20–25 Hz) in the right FFA, suggesting a feedback effect from mOFC. These findings provide evidence in humans of a potential brain basis for the “innate releasing mechanisms” described by Lorenz for affection and nurturing of young infants. This has potentially important clinical applications in relation to postnatal depression, and could provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001664
This research provides scientific evidence confirming what advertisers have known for decades that baby images elicit positive emotional responses of empathy and protection. This is useful research for trial lawyers who are in the business of creating empathy and the need for protection.The article can be accessed from the link herein. David A. Wenner
Memory and the Internet
Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow,1* Jenny Liu, 2 Daniel M. Wegner 3
1Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA. 2Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. 3Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sparrow@psych.columbia.edu
The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
A Single Exposure to the American Flag Shifts Support Toward Republicanism up to 8 Months Later
A Single Exposure to the American Flag Shifts Support Toward Republicanism up to 8 Months Later
Travis J. Carter1, Melissa J. Ferguson2, and Ran R. Hassin3
Psychological Science XX(X) 1–8 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0956797611414726 http://pss.sagepub.com
1Center for Decision Research, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago; 2Department of Psychology, Cornell University; and 3Department of Psychology and The Center for the Study of Rationality, Hebrew University
Abstract
There is scant evidence that incidental cues in the environment significantly alter people’s political judgments and behavior in a durable way. We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants, despite their overwhelming belief that exposure to the flag would not influence their behavior. In Experiment 1, which was conducted online during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants’ Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months after the exposure to the prime. In Experiment 2, we replicated the findings more than a year into the current Democratic presidential term. These results constitute the first evidence that nonconscious priming effects from exposure to a national flag can bias the citizenry toward one political party and can have considerable durability.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/07/08/0956797611414726.abstract
Monday, July 4, 2011
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