People count objects even when told not to.
The results showed that as participants’ stress levels changed, so did the age they felt.
How to stop meetings destroying productivity.
It is hard to get rid of stuff that has memories attached to it.
Even the oldest brains are still producing new neurons.
The type of people who know the least about politics.
Left-handed people prone to certain mental illnesses.
Left-handed people prone to certain mental illnesses.
People with psychotic disorders are much more likely to be left-handed, research finds.
Among people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, fully 40% are left-handed.
Among the general population, around one-in-ten people are left-handed.
People diagnosed with mood disorders, such as depression, are no more likely to be left-handed than the usual rate.
Scientists cannot explain why left-handed people seem prone to certain mental illnesses.
Dr Jadon Webb, the study’s first author, said:
“In general, people with psychosis are those who have lost touch with reality in some way, through hallucinations, delusions, or false beliefs, and it is notable that this symptom constellation seems to correlate with being left-handed.
Finding biomarkers such as this can hopefully enable us to identify and differentiate mental disorders earlier, and perhaps one day tailor treatment in more effective ways.”
The 107 people in the study were simply asked which hand they wrote with.
The participants were all outpatients at a psychiatric clinic.
Dr Jadon Webb said:
“This told us much of what we needed to know in a very simple, practical way.
Doing a simple analysis meant that there were no obstacles to participating and we had a very high participation rate of 97%.
Patients dealing with serious symptoms of psychosis might have had a harder time participating in a more complicated set of questions or tests.
By keeping the survey simple, we were able to get an accurate snapshot of a hard-to-study subgroup of mentally ill people — those who are often poverty-stricken with very poor family and community support.”
The study was published in the journal SAGE Open (Webb et al., 2013).
The results of 46,034 brain scans are in.
The results of 46,034 brain scans are in.
Women’s brains are more active than men’s, new research finds.
Results from 46,034 brain scans found that women’s brains had, on average, more activity in many regions.
These include the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in impulse control and focus.
Also, women had more activity in the limbic areas of the brain, which are involved in emotion, including anxiety and general mood.
However, the areas involved in vision and coordination were more active in men.
The differences may help to explain why women are better, on average, at empathising and self-control.
Greater activity in the areas related to mood may help to explain women’s greater susceptibility to mood disorders like depression and anxiety.
Dr Daniel G. Amen, the study’s first author, said:
“This is a very important study to help understand gender-based brain differences.
The quantifiable differences we identified between men and women are important for understanding gender-based risk for brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Using functional neuroimaging tools, such as SPECT, are essential to developing precision medicine brain treatments in the future.”
The study used SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography).
People were scanned while at rest and while performing cognitive tasks.
The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (Amen et al., 2017).
Can you get this brain teaser right? If not, maybe you’ve got too much testosterone flowing through your veins!
Can you get this brain teaser right? If not, maybe you’ve got too much testosterone flowing through your veins!
More testosterone makes men more likely to act first and think later, new research finds.
Giving men a dose of testosterone reduced the amount of ‘cognitive reflection’ they engaged in.
After the testosterone, they didn’t bother stopping to think if their gut reaction made sense.
In other words, they decided to shoot first and ask questions later.
Professor Colin Camerer, who led the study, said:
“What we found was the testosterone group was quicker to make snap judgments on brain teasers where your initial guess is usually wrong.
The testosterone is either inhibiting the process of mentally checking your work or increasing the intuitive feeling that ‘I’m definitely right.'”
For the study, 243 men were either given a testosterone gel or a placebo.
They then did a series of questions that tested their ability to think a little deeper.
Here’s one for you to try:
“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.
The bat costs $1 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?”
The snap answer is that the ball costs 10 cents.
But a moment’s reflection reveals this can’t be the right answer.
Since $1.10 + 10 cents is $1.20 and the first line of the puzzle says the bat and ball cost $1.10 together.
Time for a rethink?
Got it?
The answer is the ball costs 5 cents.
That’s because $1.05 for the bat plus 5 cents for the ball is $1.10.
Men given testosterone got 20% fewer answers right.
They also answered more quickly, despite being under no time pressure and having a financial incentive for getting the answers right.
The explanation for the effect of testosterone could be down to its confidence boosting and social dominance effect, Professor Camerer said:
“We think it works through confidence enhancement.
If you’re more confident, you’ll feel like you’re right and will not have enough self-doubt to correct mistakes.”
And what does all this mean for men having testosterone-replacement therapy in mid-life?
“If men want more testosterone to increase sex drive, are there other effects?
Do these men become too mentally bold and thinking they know things they don’t?”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Nave et al., 2017).
Swearing or hearing others swear has instant effects on both mind and body.
Swearing or hearing others swear has instant effects on both mind and body.
Swearing can make you physically stronger, new research finds.
During short, intense exercise, people could produce more power if they swore, the study found.
And this is not the only advantage of swearing that psychologists have found.
Here are a few more:
In the latest study, researchers tested people’s handgrip strength, along with the power they produced on an exercise bike.
The results showed that swearing produced more strength and more power.
Dr Richard Stephens, one of the study’s authors, who reported the research at the BPS conference, said:
“We know from our earlier research that swearing makes people more able to tolerate pain.
A possible reason for this is that it stimulates the body’s sympathetic nervous system — that’s the system that makes your heart pound when you are in danger.
If that is the reason, we would expect swearing to make people stronger too — and that is just what we found in these experiments.
But when we measured heart rate and some other things you would expect to be affected if the sympathetic nervous system was responsible for this increase in strength, we did not find significant changes.
So quite why it is that swearing has these effects on strength and pain tolerance remains to be discovered.
We have yet to understand the power of swearing fully.”
The study was presented by Dr Richard Stephens from Keele University to the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society in Brighton, 2017.
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