Clipmarks | kidora's 'psychology' clips

Cuing the Mind

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:38:43 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: If you want to read about all the cues that set us off, and motivate us, read the rest of this interesting article.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

Tags: psychology, mind, cues, brain

Natalie Portman, Neuroscientist

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 02:49:47 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: How many actors do you know take a break from acting and peruse this kind of alternative job?
This is great to actually see an actor using their brain. How wonderful !
Cheers to you Natalie.
If you click on this link you can get a copy of the paper Ms. Portman is on at the bottom of the page.

Clip Source: www.mindhacks.com

Natalie Portman is best known for her roles in Hollywood movies like Star Wars, Cold Mountain and V for Vendetta. What is less known is that she was co-author of a scientific paper on the neuroscience of child development. This is about her research.

Portman, whose real name is Natalie Hershlag, left acting to pursue a psychology degree at Harvard during 2000.

While there she was employed as a research assistant in Prof Stephen Kosslyn's neuropsychology lab where she got involved in a study investigating the link between frontal lobe development and visual knowledge in infants.

Tags: natalie-portman, neuroscience, science, development, children

If You Say It Enough Times You Can Fool All The People

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:01:59 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: Ahhh, the power of blogs. Keep on repeating yourself, someone out there will start to believe you.

Clip Source: scienceblogs.com

A fascinating study has just found that hearing one person's opinion repeated is almost as effective as hearing several different people's opinions.

Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.

The researchers had over a thousand student volunteers read statements that were supposed to represent opinions of members of a group. In some cases, they read statements attributed to three different people, but in other cases, the identical statements were attributed to a single person. In both cases, the students believed that the statements represented the opinion of the entire group more frequently compared to when they read one statement attributed to a single individual.

Tags: science, psychology, study

It's Official, Gaming Is An Addiction

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:15:15 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: Just goes to show, you can be diagnosed addicted to anything.

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

A new report urges the American Medical Association to, among other things, formally recognize game addiction as a genuine diagnosed disorder. According to Spong, the report in question is "Report Of The Council On Science And Public Health: Emotional and Behavioral Effects, Including Addictive Potential, of Video Games" chaired by Mohamed K. Khan, MD, Phd. Included in the report is the proposed medical definition of "gamer." Keep reading to find out if you qualify or not.

A gamer is a term used to describe a person who plays games. Historically, a gamer was someone who played role-playing games or war games, but more recently the term has come to include computer and video game players. Although the term technically includes those who do not necessarily consider themselves gamers (ie, casual gamers), it is a commonly used colloquial term to identify persons who spend as much of their leisure time as possible playing or reading about games.

Tags: gaming, addiction, medicine, psychology