-
How False Memory Changes What Happened Yesterday
Scientific American: Sometimes our memories are just made up. Our brains play tricks on us all the time, and these tricks can mislead us into believing we can accurately reconstruct our personal past. In reality, false memories are everywhere. False memories are recollections of things that you never actually experienced. These can be small memory errors, such as thinking you saw a yield sign when you actually saw a stop sign, or big errors like thinking you took a hot air balloon ride that never actually happened. If you want to know more about how we can come to remember complex autobiographical events, here is a recipe and here is a video with footage from my own research.
-
The surprising reasons why we tickle one another
The Washington Post: When filmmaker David Farrier came across an ad from Jane O’Brien Mediacalling for young male fitness models to be restrained and tickled on camera, he felt compelled to find out what on Earth was behind that casting call. Pushing past the production company’s vitriolic resistance to “association with a homosexual journalist,” he created and recently premiered the Sundance documentary "Tickled," which sheds light on the sport of “competitive endurance tickling.” ... The dominant image of tickling in many of our minds involves children teasing their friends or extorting their siblings.
-
Why daylight saving time can be bad for your health
Fox News: Daylight saving time is Sunday, and losing sleep after clocks "spring forward" an hour could be more than just an annoyance. This small time shift can significantly raise the risk of health-related issues. ... The Monday and Tuesday after daylight saving time in the spring have also been associated with a 10 percent increase in heart attacks, according to a 2012 study at the University of Alabama Birmingham. "When we change the time by one hour, it throws a monkey wrench into our circadian process," said Christopher Barnes, an associate professor of management at the University of Washington who researches the impact of sleep deprivation, especially in the workplace.
-
New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new articles published in Clinical Psychological Science are part of the forthcoming special series "Dissecting Antisocial Behavior: The Impact of Neural, Genetic, and Environmental Factors": Polygenic Risk for Externalizing Psychopathology and Executive Dysfunction in Trauma-Exposed Veterans Naomi Sadeh, Erika J. Wolf, Mark W. Logue, Joanna Lusk, Jasmeet P. Hayes, Regina E. McGlinchey, William P. Milberg, Annjanette Stone, Steven A. Schichman, and Mark W. Miller Although studies have indicated that externalizing problems are highly heritable, it has become apparent that this heritability is likely polygenic in nature.
-
How Caffeine Can Keep You Honest
Caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug in the world. And anyone who has ever worked in an office probably has a good reason for this socially accepted drug use: Caffeine enhances many cognitive processes, particularly when people are tired. This could explain why around 90% of Americans consume caffeine every day. In addition to wreaking havoc on productivity and safety, researchers have found evidence that sleepiness may also play a role in unethical behavior. Sleep deprivation increases the presence of adenosine, an inhibitory neuromodulator that decreases cellular activity in the brain.
-
The Art of Ignoring Things
The Atlantic: Let’s begin with a little experiment: Whatever you do, as you’re reading this short article, don’t think about polar bears. This is, you may have recognized, a classic thought exercise from the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, in a passage that launched a thousand psychology theses, he wrote, “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” ...
