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CSBBCS Honors Two APS Members
The Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) will honor APS Fellow Daphne Maurer and Evan Risko at its 25th Annual Meeting at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Daphne Maurer is the recipient of the 2015 Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award honoring an individual who “has made a significant contribution to the study of brain, behaviour, and cognitive science.” Maurer is a Distinguished University Professor and the director of the Visual Development Lab at McMaster University, Canada, where she studies the development of visual perception in children with normal eyes and those with cataracts.
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To Treat Depression, a New Approach Tries Training the Brain
The Wall Street Journal: Should depression be treated more like a stroke? That’s the view of a growing number of researchers developing new psychological treatments that aim to directly target the particular brain dysfunctions and cognitive and emotional processes understood to underlie depression. The approach is to think of a brain region that goes awry as “more like a muscle that is atrophied,” says Greg J. Siegle, director of the Program in Cognitive Affective Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The solution to an atrophied muscle is to rehab it.” ... About two-thirds of depressed people have this negative attention bias, says Christopher G.
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Why People Buckle Up in Cars, But Not in Cabs
In May, Nobel Prize-winning economist John F. Nash Jr. and his wife Alicia were tragically killed in a car accident on the New Jersey expressway. Investigators reported that they were not wearing seat belts at the time, and died after being thrown from the backseat of their taxi. Whether you’re in the front or back of a car, wearing a seat belt is often the most effective way to prevent serious injury in case of an accident. Yet, in some situations -- such as riding in the back of a cab -- people are far less likely to buckle up. In New York City, taxi drivers and their passengers are exempt from laws regarding car seats and seat belts.
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This Is Why You Feel Dirty After A Bad Day At The Office
The Huffington Post: In the 1999 cult comedy “Office Space,” dissatisfied office drone Peter Gibbons spends his days bored out of his mind, working for a boss he loathes doing work he doesn’t care about. To make matters worse, he then goes home to a loveless relationship with a girlfriend who cheats on him. Through it all, he bites his tongue, never expressing his true feelings about that useless TPS report coversheet or the unfairness of the weekend work schedule.
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Can science make you less sexist while you sleep?
The Washington Post: No matter how open-minded you think you are, you're chock-full of what scientists call implicit biases -- prejudices you don't even realize that you have that color your actions. But a fascinating new study suggests that these biases can be cut down in your sleep. By having subjects go through a bias-diminishing exercise just before taking a nap -- during which the things they'd just learned were cued up by special sounds -- researchers were able to lower their biases up to a week after the fact. The results were published Thursday in Science.
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In ‘Eating Lab,’ A Psychologist Spills Secrets On Why Diets Fail
NPR: As soon as Traci Mann's new book, Secrets From The Eating Lab, hit bookstores, I ordered my copy. As the author of a no-diet book myself, I was eager to read what one of the leading researchers on the psychology of eating, dieting and self-control had to say about why diets fail to bring about significant or sustainable weight loss. After all, Mann, who runs a lab at the University of Minnesota, has studied the scientific literature as well as her own diet subjects for two decades. She has concluded, among other things, that diets are unnecessary for optimal health. Read the whole story: NPR
