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The Search for Psychology’s Lost Boy
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The grainy, black-and-white footage, filmed in 1919 and 1920, documents what has become a classic psychology experiment, described again and again in articles and books. The idea is that the baby was conditioned to be afraid, instilled with a phobia of all things furry. The man in the tie is John Watson, the father of behaviorism, a foundational figure in psychology, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who rose from poverty to prominence only to watch his academic career cut short by scandal. When he’s remembered now, it’s often in connection with this experiment, his legacy forever entwined with the baby nicknamed Little Albert.
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Rats Regret Their Decisions, Study Finds
PBS: We bemoan our decisions when we get a bad deal or miss out. New research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience this week finds that regret may not be just a human emotion. It turns out rats also experience regret. Researcher David Redish at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis set up a “restaurant row” for his lab rats. The “restaurants” consisted of four stops where the rat could receive one option of his favorite flavor foods — banana, cherry, chocolate and a fourth unflavored food. The rat stops at the entrance and presses a button, which made a sound. The pitch indicated how long the rat needed to wait for food, anywhere from one to 45 seconds.
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No Money, No Time
The New York Times: THE absurdity of having had to ask for an extension to write this article isn’t lost on me: It is, after all, a piece on time and poverty, or, rather, time poverty — about what happens when we find ourselves working against the clock to finish something. In the case of someone who isn’t otherwise poor, poverty of time is an unpleasant inconvenience. But for someone whose lack of time is just one of many pressing concerns, the effects compound quickly. We make a mistake when we look at poverty as simply a question of financial constraint. Take what happened with my request for an extension. It was granted, and the immediate time pressure was relieved.
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Do the Miami Heat Have Too Much Talent?
The Wall Street Journal: A new research paper uses a barnyard analogy to explain why the star-studded Miami Heat now teeter on the brink of elimination: “Having too many dominant, high-egg-producing chickens in a single colony reduces overall egg production,” says a research article called “The Too-Much-Talent Effect,” to be published in the days ahead in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Actually, the 2014 Miami Heat aren’t a research subject for the paper.
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Rats Shown to Feel Regret Over Bad Decisions
BBC: It is the first time regret has been identified in mammals other than humans. Researchers created situations where rats had to choose whether to wait a set amount of time for a food reward, or move onto another one. Those that moved on and found the next offering was even worse showed regretful behaviour. Read the whole story: BBC
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Researchers: Nothing Special About Einstein’s Brain
NPR: SCOTT SIMON: Albert Einstein had an enviable mind. So much, in fact, that when he died in Princeton's hospital, the pathologist on-call stole his brain. Dr. Einstein had asked for his brain to be cremated along with the rest of him, but eventually, it wound up in slices in various research labs. And over the years, scientists have claimed to have found brain ridges or cells that might shed some light on his singular human mind. But a new scientific paper says that, in fact, there was nothing special about Einstein's brain. Dr. Terrence Hines wrote that paper. He's a professor of psychology at Pace University and joins us from his home in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
