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NIH Funding Opportunity: Modeling Social Behavior
See full announcement for deadlines. The National Institutes of Health have announced a research project grant on Modeling Social Behavior, issued by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages applications for developing and testing innovative theories and computational, mathematical, or engineering approaches to deepen our understanding of complex social behavior. This research will examine phenomena at multiple scales to address the emergence of collective behaviors that arise from individual elements or parts of a system working together.
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New EU Declaration on Investment in Social Sciences and Humanities
The European Union (EU) expects research and innovation to be the foundation for its future growth. Horizons 2020, an initiative running from 2014 to 2020 with a budget of a little more than €70 billion, is the EU’s new program for research and innovation and is part of the drive to create new growth and jobs in Europe. In September, a two-day conference was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, organized by the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, to address how socio-economic sciences and humanities can be incorporated into Horizons 2020. The result is the Vilnius Declaration on Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), published on September 24.
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Blindsight in Children With Cerebral Lesions
Congenital or acquired damage to the visual processing areas of the brain is often associated with a loss of vision. Despite sustaining damage to these brain areas, some people retain an unconscious ability to respond to visual stimuli — and ability termed blindsight. Although these people are not consciously aware of visual stimuli, they are in many instances able to direct their eyes towards target items and to discriminate the orientation and direction of movement presented in their area of blindness. Studies examining blindsight have found that those who acquire damage early in life retain more visual ability than those who acquire brain damage in adolescence or adulthood.
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Study Identifies Genetic Tie to Marital Satisfaction
Psychological researchers have found, for the first time, a link between a gene variant and marital satisfaction. “An enduring mystery is, what makes one spouse so attuned to the emotional climate in a marriage, and another so oblivious?,” said APS Past President Robert Levenson, a professor at University of California, Berkeley and lead author of the study. “With these new genetic findings, we now understand much more about what determines just how important emotions are for different people.” Specifically, researchers from UC Berkeley and Northwestern University found a link between relationship fulfillment and a gene variant, or “allele,” known as 5-HTTLPR.
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Is Beauty in the Average or the Individual?
The beauty-in-averageness effect stems from research showing that a blended face, a morph of multiple individual faces, is generally rated as being more attractive than its individual component faces.
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General Psychopathology Factor May Describe Structure of Psychiatric Disorders
Mental disorders have traditionally been viewed as distinct categorical entities, but the high incidence of comorbid, or co-occurring, disorders challenges this view. As researchers Terrie Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi, and colleagues observe in their new article in Clinical Psychological Science, about half of the people who meet diagnostic criteria for one disorder also meet the diagnostic criteria for another disorder at the same time.
