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Brenda Milner Awarded Pearl Meister Greengard Prize
APS Fellow and Charter Member Brenda Milner, the Dorothy J. Killam Professor at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute will be honored with the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize Thursday, November 3, 2011 for her work in the field of cognitive neuroscience. The Pearl Meister Greengard Prize was founded by Nobel laureate Paul Greengard and his wife to recognize outstanding female scientists and researchers. The honor comes with a $100,000 award. Milner is best known for her work with a famous patient named Henry Gustav Molaison (a.k.a., HM), who had parts of his left and right medial temporal lobes removed.
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Turn That Frown Upside Down
How can you make your day better? Turn that frown upside down. As corny as that phrase is, science can back it up. As part of the Wall Street Journal's "Is It True" video series, Christina Tsuei interviewed APS member George Bonanno about whether smiles really do improve your mood. Bonanno, author of “The Other Side of Sadness,” talked about the benefits of a spontaneous joy-filled smile. The video below also references a 2010 study published in Psychological Science, Cosmetic Use of Botulinum Toxin-A Affects Processing of Emotional Language.
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Genetic Research Helps Scientists Understand Alcohol Use
A rat, a mouse, and a vole walked into a bar… It isn’t just a bad joke: According to John Crabbe, who delivered the 16th Annual Mark Keller Honorary Lecture at the National Institute of Health on October 25, rodents can teach us a lot about the way humans behave when they consume alcohol. Crabbe, who serves as Director of the Portland Alcohol Research Center, was honored for pinpointing genes and neurobiological factors that shape the way mammals respond to alcohol. Breeding mice that are resistant or susceptible to the negative results of alcohol use allowed Crabbe to study interactions among genes, environmental factors, and alcohol-related behaviors.
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Protective Behavioral Strategies as a Mediator and Moderator in Alcohol-Related Outcomes
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Gabrielle D'Lima from Old Dominion University present her research on “Protective Behavioral Strategies as a Mediator and Moderator in Alcohol-Related Outcomes.” With coauthors Matthew R. Pearson (Old Dominion University) andMichelle L. Kelley (Old Dominion University), Gabrielle D'Lima investigated the role of protective behavioral strategies as a possible mediator and moderator of the relationship between self-regulation and alcohol-related outcomes in first-year undergraduates. Self-regulation, in general, has been found to predict alcohol consequences.
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Why Does That Conductor Look So Creepy?
Several movies have tried and failed to generate lifelike animations of humans. For example, the lifeless faces in Polar Express made people uncomfortable because they tried to emulate life but didn’t get it quite right. “There’s something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home,” says Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College. Humans can see faces in anything—the moon, a piece of toast, two dots and a line for a nose—but we are much more discriminating when it comes to deciding what’s alive and what’s not.
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Is Violence Declining? APS Fellow Steven Pinker Says “Yes”
Violence is as an inherent part of human society. So if you looked at the number of violent deaths from prehistory to the present day, you would expect to see a pretty steady trend, right? Not so, says APS Fellow Steven Pinker. “Violence has been in decline for thousands of years,” he says. “We may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” Pinker, who is a psychological scientist from Harvard University, collected his research on the subject in a new book called The Better Angels of Our Nature. He discussed the book in a recent lecture at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Washington DC.
