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The Dark Side of Oxytocin
For a hormone, oxytocin is pretty famous. It’s the “cuddle chemical”—the hormone that helps mothers bond with their babies. Salespeople can buy oxytocin spray on the internet, to make their clients trust them. It’s known for promoting positive feelings, but more recent research has found that oxytocin can promote negative emotions, too. The authors of a new review article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, takes a look at what oxytocin is really doing. Oxytocin’s positive effects are well known.
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Understanding Unconscious Associations
Mahzarin Banaji studies how our minds make decisions without awareness, intention, and control. She analyses how one human being judges another and the extent to which social groups (such as nationality, gender, race, physical attributes) enter into choices. She studies both behavior and the brain, she analyzes the minds of both adults and young children, and she conducts her experiments in the traditional laboratory as well as on the web. With two colleagues she hosts an educational and research site (www.implicit.harvard.edu) at which the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is used to teach people about the associations in our minds of which we are unaware.
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Food for Thought
Ask 10 people how a certain food tastes and most likely, you will get 10 different answers. The science of taste is the focus of Linda Bartoshuk's research, including how individuals vary in their genetic ability to taste. In addition to conducting basic taste research, Bartoshuk works with patient populations, studying taste and oral pain disorders. Bartoshuk's lab discovered supertasters, individuals who perceive very intense tastes (they have more taste buds than most people). Due to their strong taste experiences, supertasters tend to avoid a number of foods (e.g., bitter vegetables); this can affect health risks.
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Regulating Social Behavior
How do people regulate their social behavior, especially when unconscious prejudices and stereotypes threaten to bias our responses? David Amodio studies the mechanisms of self-regulation by integrating ideas and methods from social psychology, neuroscience, and psychophysiology. His research has elucidated the sources of implicit bias, rooted in separate systems for learning and memory, as well as the interacting neurocognitive mechanisms involved in the control of social responses. This work has led to a better understanding of why self-regulation sometimes fails and why some people are better at self-regulation than others.
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J. David Creswell
Carnegie Mellon University, Health and Human Performance Laboratory www.psy.cmu.edu/~creswell/ What does your research focus on? My research focuses on how the mind and brain influence our physical health. Much of my work examines basic questions about stress and coping and trying to understand how these factors can be modulated through stress-reduction interventions. In two related lines of research, I am exploring the mechanisms for how self-affirmation and mindfulness meditation reduce stress and improve health outcomes in at-risk stressed patient populations.
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Angela Duckworth
University of Pennsylvania www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/ What does your research focus on? I study individual differences that predict achievement. In particular, I’m interested in self-control, defined as the regulation of emotion, attention, and behavior in the service of valued goals and standards, and grit, defined as sustained perseverance and passion for especially challenging goals.