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A Friendly Face Might Mask Ill Intent
Oxytocin, sometimes called the “trust hormone” might actually inhibit our skill in detecting hidden intentions in others’ faces, a study suggests.
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Give Your Halloween Candy a Flavor Boost with Psychological Science
Late on Halloween night, with candy strewn across the dining room table, millions of children across the United States will enjoy the hard-earned fruits of their trick-or-treating labors. After picking through the spoils and immediately
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Stress Eaters May Compensate by Eating Less When Times Are Good
When faced with stress, some people seem to lose their appetite while others reach for the nearest sweet, salty, or fatty snack. Conventional wisdom tells us that stress eaters are the ones who need to
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Learning Vocabulary and Grammar
Janellen Huttenlocher has published on a range of research topics, including language, spatial coding in adults and children, quantitative development, and memory. Huttenlocher has been particularly interested in the role of the child’s environment in the development of cognitive skills. One of her most famous findings is that the verbal behavior of parents and teachers not only determined children’s vocabulary growth, but also their grammatical learning. Huttenlocher has also conducted research on conceptual representation and memory, including the role of concepts in people’s memories of events.
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A Simple ‘Thanks’ Can Tame the Barking Boss
Supervisors often resort to bullying to compensate for their own feelings of incompetence. But studies show that bosses lower their aggression when they feel appreciated.
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Finding the Inner Voices
Hearing voices in one’s head is a hallmark symptom of schizophrenia. Those auditory hallucinations are caused by overstimulation in the brain regions that process sound. But when the inner voices start talking, the brain fails to respond to real voices. Biological psychological scientist Kenneth Hugdahl and his research team identified this paradox when they had hallucinating patients listen to sounds through headphones and measured their brain activity using neuroimaging technology, in addition to psychological measures. They found that the heightened brain activity that is associated with vocal hallucinations simultaneously douses the perception of real sounds.
