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Northeastern researchers experiment with fear at Newton haunted house
The Boston Globe: NEWTON — A squad of elite fear specialists will descend into the slightly musty basement of a Victorian house Friday night to take up haunting positions. Their preferred instrument of terror? Insights from the science of emotion. The monsters and ghouls in this unusual haunted house are Northeastern University psychology researchers who spend their days generating emotional responses in the laboratory, to probe what’s happening in the brain when people experience visceral feelings.
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Trouble at the lab
The Economist: “I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace. Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded.
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Brain Training Exercises Won’t Boost Intelligence, But Could Improve Memory
The Huffington Post: Brain training exercises can boost your memory, but don't expect them to make you any smarter, a new study says. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, Michigan State University and Purdue University found that brain training seems to improve working memory capacity (the ability to keep or quickly recall information under distraction), but doesn't seem to have any effect on general fluid intelligence (the ability to practice complex reasoning skills and solve new problems). Past research had suggested that there was a correlation between the two, with some hypothesizing that boosting one would then boost the other.
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Seeing in 3D ‘possible with one eye’, St Andrews study suggests
BBC: The effect of "vivid 3D vision" can be experienced with just one eye, a study has suggested. Researchers at St Andrews University said a method using a small circular hole could have wide implications for 3D technology. The study, published in Psychological Science, also has implications for people who have just one eye or difficulties with double-eye vision. The method was said to create 3D similar to effects used in film-making. Researchers said that current thinking was based on the need for two visual images - one from each eye - to be combined in the visual cortex, creating a sense of depth.
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Are you okay? You smell like cytokines.
Nurses and hospice workers say they can smell the final approach of death. Not with sudden death, but with the slow march toward the grave, the body’s systems begin to shut down and metabolism changes, so that breath and skin and fluids give off a distinctive odor that signals the end is near. This is not surprising. In fact it’s more perplexing that deadly diseases don’t announce their presence earlier. From an evolutionary perspective, it would be more advantageous if we could all detect early warning signals, olfactory cues that the immune system is gearing up to ward off a new and threatening disease. Psychological scientists call this the behavioral immune response.
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People Seem More Attractive in a Group Than They Do Apart
People tend to be rated as more attractive when they’re part of a group than when they’re alone, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This phenomenon -- first dubbed the “cheerleader effect” by ladykiller Barney Stinson on the popular TV show How I Met Your Mother — suggests that having a few friends around might be an easy way to boost perceived attractiveness.
