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Lo que una persona piense de su enfermedad influye en cuánto se puede curar, o no
Yahoo! Noticias: Lo que una persona piensa de su enfermedad afecta la evolución de la patología, al punto que puede determinar la curación y como queda su estado de salud. Polémica, si se tiene en cuenta que no todas las enfermedades tienen un origen psicosomático, es la conclusión a la que llegaron los psicólogos Keith Petrie de la Universidad de Auckland (Australia) y John Weinman del King's College de Londres (Reino Unido). Es que ellos aseguran haber hallado en sus investigaciones que la percepción que tienen las personas de su propia enfermedad afecta muchas decisiones, como por ejemplo si van a seguir el tratamiento asignado por su médico.
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Politics, Odors and Soap
The New York Times: Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering. One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond. Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.
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Daydream Believers: Scientists Ask Why Our Minds Wander
ABC: Zoning out while trying to read this? No offense taken, since all of us do it at least a third of the time that we're awake. In recent years a number of academicians have ventured into this previously unexplored territory, trying to figure out why our minds wander while we're supposed to be paying attention. They were probably spurred on by the blank faces of their students during their stimulating lectures. But despite considerable interest in determining precisely why we zone out so often, scientists say it is still a bit unclear why we do it. There's some good news, however.
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Imaging study reveals differences in brain function for children with math anxiety
Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time how brain function differs in people who have math anxiety from those who don’t. A series of scans conducted while second- and third-grade students did addition and subtraction revealed that those who feel panicky about doing math had increased activity in brain regions associated with fear, which caused decreased activity in parts of the brain involved in problem-solving.
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Conflicting Moralities
The Wall Street Journal: The work of Jonathan Haidt often infuriates his fellow liberals. A professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, he has focused in recent years on trying to understand the range and variety of our moral intuitions, especially as they relate to the most polarizing issues of the day. What he sees across the dividing line of American politics is a battle of unequals: Republicans who "understand moral psychology" arrayed against Democrats who "don't." Mr. Haidt is not simply parroting the familiar charge that the party of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove is more adept at the dark arts of political manipulation.
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Context for Fla. shooting? Study finds holding gun makes you likely to think others have guns
The Washington Post: No one knows what led a Florida neighborhood watch captain to shoot Trayvon Martin, a teenager carrying no weapon. But a new study raises an intriguing question: Could the watch captain have been fooled into thinking the youth was armed in part because he himself was holding a gun? In the study, volunteers who held a toy gun and glimpsed fleeting images of people holding an object were biased toward thinking the object was a gun.
