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Monkeys Might Be More Logical Than We Think
You see a big cat nursing a kitten, and you assume Cat A is Cat B’s mother. Then you see a bird dropping worms in a smaller bird’s mouth. Different content, different context, but same relationship—you conclude that Big Bird is Little Bird’s mom. This is an analogy—a relationship between relationships. What is behind this ability—and is it uniquely human? “There is a long debate as to whether this ability is dependent on language,” says Center for Research in Cognitive Neurosciences and University of Provence cognitive psychologist Joël Fagot. “It has been shown in apes who have been language trained.” But can animals perceive analogies without language?
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Put your stress on vacation
Los Angeles Times: Got stress? If you answered no, hooray for you! (And, by the way, what planet are you from?) But if you answered yes (like any normal member of the human race), you're likely heartened by the arrival of vacation season. Just the ticket for a little stress-reduction. And that can have some big payoffs. It can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system and help you live longer. It may even make you smarter. "A vacation is not a luxury," says Jens Pruessner, an associate professor in the departments of psychology, psychiatry, neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal.
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Plan Your Way to Less Stress, More Happiness
TIME: A recent survey by psychologist and self-help author Robert Epstein found that 25% of our happiness hinges on how well we're able to manage stress. The next logical question is, of course, how best can we reduce our stress? Epstein's data, which he presented last month at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Los Angeles, was intended to help answer that question. It involved 3,000 participants in the U.S. and 29 other countries, who responded to an online questionnaire.
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Violent Video Games Linked to Increased Aggression
MSN Health: Violent video games trigger aggression among those who play them, according to a new University of Missouri study. Such players showed more hostility because their brains had become less responsive, or desensitized, to violence -- a response that the researchers linked to increased aggression. "From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence," study co-author Bruce Bartholow, an associate professor of psychology at UM College of Arts and Sciences, said in a university news release. Read more: MSN Health
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How death affects life
Examiner.com How you think about death affects how you behave in life. That's the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science During the study, researchers had people either think about death in the abstract or in a specific, personal way and found that people who thought specifically about their own death were more likely to demonstrate concern for society by donating blood. Read more at: Examiner.com
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Blanks for the Memories
The Wall Street Journal: A rowdy cousin … an Eeyore T-shirt … a dog-shaped balloon. Why we remember some scenes from early childhood and forget others has long intrigued scientists—as well as parents striving to create happy memories for their kids. One of the biggest mysteries: why most people can't seem to recall anything before age 3 or 4. Now, researchers in Canada have demonstrated that some young children can remember events from even before age 2—but those memories are fragile, with many vanishing by about age 10, according to a study in the journal Child Development this month. Read more at : The Wall Street Journal
