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The Flexibility of Racial Bias
Scientific American: The city of Baltimore was rocked by protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody. Tragically, Gray’s death was only one of a recent in a series of racially-charged, often violent, incidents. On April 4th, Walter Scott was fatally shot by a police officer after fleeing from a routine traffic stop. ... It would be easy to see in all this powerful evidence that racism is a permanent fixture in America’s social fabric and even, perhaps, an inevitable aspect of human nature. Indeed, the mere act of labeling others according to their age, gender, or race is a reflexive habit of the human mind.
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Fourth Annual Stanford Psychology Conference
The Fourth Annual Stanford Psychology Conference will be held July 16 and 17, 2015, at Stanford University’s Paul Brest Hall. The conference focuses on the teaching of introductory psychology. For more information, see the conference website.
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25th Annual Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science Meeting
Carleton University will host the 25th Annual Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science Meeting (CSBBCS) from June 5 to 7, 2015. For more information, visit the conference website.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: It's All in the Family: Brain Asymmetry and Syntactic Processing of Word Class Chia-lin Lee and Kara D. Federmeier The specialization of the left hemisphere for language processing is considered to be one of the key examples of functional lateralization in the brain; however, studies now indicate that the right hemisphere may play a larger role in language than was once assumed. Electroencephalographic data were collected as right-handed participants judged the grammaticality of phrases presented in the left or right visual field.
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CSBBCS Honors Two APS Members
The Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) will honor APS Fellow Daphne Maurer and Evan Risko at its 25th Annual Meeting at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Daphne Maurer is the recipient of the 2015 Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award honoring an individual who “has made a significant contribution to the study of brain, behaviour, and cognitive science.” Maurer is a Distinguished University Professor and the director of the Visual Development Lab at McMaster University, Canada, where she studies the development of visual perception in children with normal eyes and those with cataracts.
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To Treat Depression, a New Approach Tries Training the Brain
The Wall Street Journal: Should depression be treated more like a stroke? That’s the view of a growing number of researchers developing new psychological treatments that aim to directly target the particular brain dysfunctions and cognitive and emotional processes understood to underlie depression. The approach is to think of a brain region that goes awry as “more like a muscle that is atrophied,” says Greg J. Siegle, director of the Program in Cognitive Affective Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The solution to an atrophied muscle is to rehab it.” ... About two-thirds of depressed people have this negative attention bias, says Christopher G.
