-
9/11 Psychology: Just How Resilient Were We?
TIME: 9/11 was devastating in terms of lives lost — nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks — but it was not physically destructive (with the obvious exception of Ground Zero) on the same massive scale. Since most of New York City remained structurally intact, an intense focus was placed on the psychological needs of its residents (and, to a lesser extent, on residents of Washington, D.C.) One month after 9/11, the National Institute for Mental Health gathered together a group of international experts to figure out how to best help a traumatized population, but as a new report in American Psychologist explains, there was no clear model of what to expect and how to proceed.
-
2012 SOMAS in the Neurosciences Grants
SOMAS (Support of Mentors and their Students in the neurosciences) intends to award four grants for $8,000 apiece to junior neuroscience faculty so that they can launch research programs at their home institutions and hone their skills at mentoring undergraduate students. The SOMAS grant application receipt deadline is December 1. For more information visit: http://www.somasprogram.org/
-
Don’t Mess With a Nursing Mom!
U.S. News & World Report: Breast-feeding mothers protect their babies and themselves more aggressively than mothers who bottle-feed or women without children, researchers say. The study of 18 nursing mothers, 17 formula-feeding mothers and 20 non-mothers also found that aggression in breast-feeding moms is associated with reduced blood pressure. This suggests that breast-feeding helps lower the body's typical stress response to fear, which gives women extra courage in defending their babies and themselves, according to the authors of the study in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science. Read the full story: U.S. News & World Report
-
Psychopaths on Wall Street?
Financial News: 'Are you good or evil', a BBC Horizon documentary which aired last night, examined what makes humans liable to violence. The programme charts the research of criminal psychologist Professor Robert Hare, who developed the Pyschopathy Checklist, which is used to diagnose cases of psychopathy and to ascertain the likelihood of violent behaviour, and neuroscientist Professor Jim Fallon. The two main factors in ascertaining whether an individual is liable to become a psychopath, according to the programme, are: the existence of the so-called 'warrior gene', the Monoamine oxidase A enzyme, and a violent childhood. Read the full story: Financial News
-
Seeing is not always believing
Yahoo! Philippines: Paying attention to keep a close watch may quite have the reverse effect. It actually distorts perception of where things are in relation to one another, says a research. 'Figuring out where objects are in the world seems like one of the most basic and important jobs the brain does,' says Yale University cognitive psychologist Brandon Liverence, who led the study. 'It was surprising to discover that even this simple type of perception is warped by our minds,' adds Liverence, the journal Psychological Science reports.
-
Food Insecurity: 1 in 6 Americans Struggles to Buy Food
ABC News: The number of Americans struggling to put food on the table remains at record levels though the Obama administration says the government’s safety net has kept hunger from getting worse. The USDA reports about one out of every six Americans had trouble coming up with enough money to buy food at some point last year. That’s nearly 49 million people – 14.5 percent of the population – a figure virtually unchanged from previous year. That marks a second consecutive year that the USDA’s annual hunger survey has found ”food insecurity” at the highest levels since the government started the report in 1995.
