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Damned Spot: Guilt, Scrubbing, and More Guilt
The Huffington Post: Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most complex characters, and by far the bard's most obsessive. Immorally ambitious, she prods her husband to murder Scotland's king, and then deludes herself into believing that "a little water will clear us of this deed." But for all of her repeated hand washing, the ritual cannot cleanse her of her consuming guilt, and by Act V the stubborn blood stains have driven the illegitimate queen to madness and suicide. ... And they were, clearly. As Dar reports in a forthcoming article in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, hand washing did salve guilt about past misdeeds, and reduce willingness to help another person.
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How to Get Beyoncé Out of Your Head: The Scientific Solution
The Atlantic: Here are, in no particular order, some of the songs most likely to get stuck in your head when you hear them. Apologies in advance. - "Single Ladies" - Beyoncé - "Alejandro" - Lady Gaga - "Bad Romance" - Lady Gaga - "Call Me Maybe" - Carly Rae Jepsen - "I Want to Hold Your Hand" - The Beatles - "She Loves You" - The Beatles - "SOS" - Rihanna - "You Belong With Me" - Taylor Swift According to music psychologist Ira Hyman, who recently published a paper on earworm science in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, songs function much like puzzles in our brains: Music is catchy because its patterns and rhythms engage our minds like a crossword puzzle would.
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Maybe Isolation, Not Loneliness, Shortens Life
NPR: Loneliness hurts, but social isolation can kill you. That's the conclusion of a study of more than 6,500 people in the U.K. The study, by a team at University College London, comes after decades of research showing that both loneliness and infrequent contact with friends and family can, independently, shorten a person's life. The scientists expected to find that the combination of these two risk factors would be especially dangerous. ... "It doesn't negate the loneliness work that's been done to date," says Bert Uchino, a University of Utah psychology professor.
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Martin M. Monti
University of California, Los Angeles http://montilab.psych.ucla.edu What does your research focus on? My research focuses on two questions confronting the most characterizing aspects of the human mind: 1) “What is the relationship between language and thought?” and 2) “How and why is consciousness lost and (sometimes) recovered after severe brain injury?” With respect to the first question, I focus on high-level cognition, including arithmetic and music cognition, and logic inference. Does the structure of natural language provide a scaffolding upon which we developed structure-dependent thought in other domains of cognition?
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Piercarlo Valdesolo
Claremont McKenna College cmcmeatlab.com What does your research focus on? I study the influence of discrete emotions on social and moral judgment, with a particular interest in the adaptive importance of these states. Usually this involves constructing realistic social situations in the lab meant to elicit a particular emotional state from participants, and then measuring its effects on phenomena such as trust, cooperation, altruism, blame, or punishment. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? I fell into this topic serendipitously.
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Benjamin Storm
University of California, Santa Cruz http://people.ucsc.edu/~bcstorm/research.html What does your research focus on? My research focuses broadly on human memory with a special focus on the causes and consequences of forgetting. Although forgetting may seem like a failure of memory, in many instances it is essential for the efficient and adaptive functioning of memory. Some of my research has shown that forgetting is critical for resolving competition during retrieval, overcoming fixation in creative problem solving, updating autobiographical memory, and facilitating new learning. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you?
