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Brief Mindfulness Training May Boost Test Scores, Working Memory
College students who underwent mindfulness training showed improved working memory and verbal reasoning scores.
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Arguments in the Home Linked With Babies’ Brain Functioning
Being exposed to arguments between parents is associated with the way babies’ brains process emotional tone of voice, according to a new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, conducted by graduate student Alice Graham with her advisors Phil Fisher and Jennifer Pfeifer of the University of Oregon, found that infants respond to angry tone of voice, even when they’re asleep. Babies’ brains are highly plastic, allowing them to develop in response to the environments and encounters they experience.
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Kristen Lindquist
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill www.unc.edu/~kal29 What does your research focus on? My research focuses on understanding the nature of human emotion. I’m broadly interested in understanding what emotions are, how they are created by the brain, and how they emerge during social behavior. My ongoing lines of research are united by the hypothesis that emotions are constructed of more fundamental psychological processes that are general to all mental states. In this view, emotions arise from the combination of basic positive and negative feelings, concept knowledge, and attention.
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Edward Lemay
University of New Hampshire http://lemay.socialpsychology.org What does your research focus on? I have a number of research interests related to interpersonal relationships. One line of research examines motivated cognition within the context of relationships, especially how motivation may bias perceptions of partners’ care, commitment, and regard. In a related line of research, I am examining the motivation to be valued by partners and its impact on interpersonal behavior. Finally, in a third line of research, I am examining how people manage relationships with chronically insecure and emotionally unstable relationship partners.
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Sangeet Khemlani
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Lab http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/skhemlani http://www.nrl.navy.mil/aic/iss What does your research focus on? My research examines the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying deductive reasoning, creative thinking, and abductive explanations. A major challenge is to explain why people are predictably poor on some tasks, e.g., making certain deductions or estimating probabilities, but extraordinarily skilled at others, e.g., devising explanations. My collaborators and I think that the answer to this question is that mental simulations are the basis of high-level thinking.
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Philipp Kanske
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences www.kanske.de www.cbs.mpg.de/staff/kanske-291 What does your research focus on? My research interests evolve around the central topic of “emotion”. Specifically, my work tries to elucidate how emotions influence attention and cognitive control? How, in turn, emotions are modulated through cognitive processes? And what role the capacity to modulate emotions plays in understanding others? I study these questions in the context of psychopathology, using neuroscience tools to better understand the neural bases of alterations in depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental disorders.
