First impressions have a profound effect on our everyday lives. We use them to determine who we should approach and who we should avoid. They can be a deciding factor in mate choice, trustworthiness judgments, and hiring deci- sions. Moreover, there is evidence that they may influence court decisions, election results, and professional evaluations. A growing number of studies are examining the way in which we quickly and automatically make trait impressions of others and use that knowledge, but few have examined the conditions under which we remember these impressions. This is surprising, because the memory of these impressions has the capacity to influence our future actions. Though current research suggests that we are experts at forming quick, automatic impressions, little is known about the processes that support retaining these impressions in long-term memory. (…)

The present study used a subsequent-memory paradigm to test the conditions under which the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), is implicated in the encoding of first impressions. We found that intentionally forming impressions engages the dmPFC more than does incidentally forming impressions, and that this engagement supports the encoding of remembered impressions. In addition, we found that diagnostic information, which more readily lends itself to forming trait impressions, engages the dmPFC more than does neutral information. These results indicate that the neural system subserving memory for impressions is sensitive to consciously formed impressions. The results also suggest a distinction between a social memory system and other explicit memory systems governed by the medial temporal lobes.

{ The Psychonomic Society/Springer | Continue reading | PDF }

photo { Larry Sultan }

For example, people who are induced to nod their heads while listening to a message (ostensibly to test the headphones they are wearing for comfort and staying-power) express greater confidence in the message thereafter than those who have been induced to shake their heads while listening. This is just what we would think when observing other people: if they nod while they listen we assume they agree, and if they shake their heads while they listen we assume they disagree. Likewise, right-handed people who are induced to write statements with their left hands express lower confidence afterwards in the statements that they have written than people who write with their right hands. This is because the shaky writing makes the thoughts look hesitant. (And people who look at the written statements of others will make just the same judgments about the writers’ states of confidence.)

People are completely unaware that they are always interpreting themselves in just the same way that they interpret others.

{ Interview with Peter Carruthers | Continue reading }

photo { William Klein, Dance in Brooklyn, NY, 1955 }

Walker and his team tried to measure how sleeping can help us to process bad experiences. (…)

The results show that during the REM sleep the part of the brain that processes the emotions (the amygdala) decreased its activity, so that the prefrontal cortex, linked to rational actions, probably weakened the impact of a bad experience. Also, they noticed a drop in the levels of brain chemicals that are linked to stress.

“Somewhere between the initial event and the later point of recollecting, the brain has performed an elegant trick of divorcing emotions from memory, so it’s no longer itself emotional,” Walker said.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

In daily life, we recognize faces both holistically and also “analytically”—that is, picking out individual parts, such as eyes or nose. But while the brain uses analytical processing for all kinds of objects—cars, houses, animals—“holistic processing is thought to be especially critical to face recognition,” says Liu. (…)

“Individuals who process faces more holistically are better at face recognition.” (…) “Our findings partly explains why some never forget faces, while others misrecognize their friends and relatives frequently.”

There was no link between facial recognition and general intelligence, which is made up of various cognitive processes—a suggestion that face processing is unique. (…)

The research holds promise for therapies for that second category of people, who may suffer disorders such as prosopagnosia (face blindness) and autism.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Sit back, close your eyes, relax for a minute and allow your mind to wander wherever it wants to go. Don’t try to think of anything… Have you ever wondered what is going on inside your brain when your mind isn’t doing anything in particular, just like a moment ago? It turns out quite a lot.

One of the most astonishing qualities of the brain is its voracious appetite for energy. It accounts for only 2% of body weight, yet it burns an amazing 20% of the total calories consumed by the body. So you might think that the brain at rest would be conserving energy until the next task, but this is hardly the case. The energy consumption of the brain at rest decreases by only 5% compared to a brain at full capacity. Scientists have named the energy consumed during rest the brain’s “dark energy,” since the massive energy consumption during this so-called rest period is one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience today.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

screenshot { Marley Shelton in Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, 2007 }

We investigated the relationship between creativity, personality, latent inhibition (LI), and psychopathology.

The results suggest that actors and polydrug dependents can be characterized by (a) high scores in the personality dimension psychoticism, (b) high originality during creative idea generation, and (c) decreased LI as compared with the other groups. Correlational analyses moreover revealed significant associations between LI, originality, and psychoticism.

According to our findings, creative people and people suffering from mental disorders appear to share some common personality and cognitive traits.

{ APA PsychNET | Continue reading }

Three pathways to disinhibition:

• Social Power: Powerful people are used to relative abundance and have an increased inclination to pursue potential rewards. Because the experience of power increases a “goal and reward focus,” individuals feel less restrained in expressing their current motives – regardless of the social implications.

• Intoxication: Consuming too much alcohol decreases cognitive resources, and only the most prominent cues will guide behavior in this state. Thus, pre-existing attitudes and personality traits may be expressed more freely, such as aggressive tendencies or risky sexual decision-making. At the same time, however, inebriated individuals tend to be more helpful than sober counterparts when the situation calls for heroism.

• Anonymity: A cloaked identity serves to reduce social desirability concerns and external constraints on action. As such, an individual may be less inclined to maintain usual levels of social acceptance. This could result in higher levels of honesty and self-disclosure – or heightened aggression and verbal abuse – in an anonymous chatroom.

Each of these processes - a reward focus, cognitive exhaustion, and lack of social concerns - block the same neurological system - the Behavioral Inhibition System - that regulates behavior. The combination of these forces (e.g., a powerful person who has been imbibing all night and then goes into an anonymous chat room) is likely to produce the most disinhibition.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

related { When the economy is down, alcohol consumption goes up }

photo { Craig Mammano }

I call it “Broks’s paradox”: the condition of believing that the mind is separate from the body, even though you know this belief to be untrue. (…)

Alexander Vilenkin, a physicist, believes that our universe is just one of an infinite number of similar regions. But “it follows from quantum mechanics” that the number of histories that can be played out in them is finite. The upshot of this crossplay of finitudes and infinities is that every possible history will play out in an infinite number of regions, which means there should be an infinite number of places with histories identical to our own down to the atomic level. “I find this rather depressing,” says Vilenkin, “but it is probably true.” The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, on the other hand, believes that “consciousness and its contents are all that exists,” the physical universe being “among the humbler contents of consciousness.” (…)

This brings us to death. The psychologist Jesse Bering believes we will never get our heads around the idea. He calls it “Unamuno’s paradox,” after the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who was troubled not so much by the prospect of his own death as by his inability in life to get any kind of imaginative purchase on what the state of being dead would be “like.”

{ Prospect | Continue reading }

photo { Lissy-Laricchia }

Although human love is a complicated and long journey, scientists consistently find that the release of a specific neuropetide—oxytocin—may kick start these feelings right away in courtship. In fact, for the past few decades researchers have referred to oxytocin as the “love hormone,” and credit its release as the glue that ties humans to their loved ones.

Oxytocin’s cupid effect is not specific to romantic love, but rather various forms of pro-sociality. Pregnancy and labor are times when a woman naturally experiences surges of oxytocin, which may facilitate mother-infant bonding. In males, administering oxytocin has been shown to increase trust, understanding, and even enhance empathy in males with social deficits. Nonetheless, oxytocin is best known for keeping us monogamous, or “pair bonded” as the scientists say. (…)

While oxytocin may enhance positive emotions and pro-sociality with the people we care about, it may also contribute to negative views and behaviors towards people to whom we are not close.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

painting { Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Sleeping Woman, 1897 }

The concept that the gut and the brain are closely connected, and that this interaction plays an important part not only in gastrointestinal function but also in certain feeling states and in intuitive decision making, is deeply rooted in our language.

Recent neurobiological insights into this gut–brain crosstalk have revealed a complex, bidirectional communication system that not only ensures the proper maintenance of gastrointestinal homeostasis and digestion but is likely to have multiple effects on affect, motivation and higher cognitive functions, including intuitive decision making.

{ Nature Reviews Neuroscience }

images { 1 | 2 }

Almost everyone has experienced one memory triggering another, but explanations for that phenomenon have proved elusive. Now, University of Pennsylvania researchers have provided the first neurobiological evidence that memories formed in the same context become linked, the foundation of the theory of episodic memory. (…)

“Theories of episodic memory suggest that when I remember an event, I retrieve its earlier context and make it part of my present context,” Kahana said.  “When I remember my grandmother, for example, I pull back all sorts of associations of a different time and place in my life; I’m also remembering living in Detroit and her Hungarian cooking. It’s like mental time travel. I jump back in time to the past, but I’m still grounded in the present.” (…)

“By examining the patterns of brain activity recorded from the implanted electrodes,” Manning said, “we can measure when the brain’s activity is similar to a previously recorded pattern. When a patient recalls a word, their brain activity is similar to when they studied the same word.   In addition, the patterns at recall contained traces of other words that were studied prior to the recalled word.”

“What seems to be happening is that when patients recall a word, they bring back not only the thoughts associated with the word itself but also remnants of thoughts associated with other words they studied nearby in time,” he said.

{ Penn News | Continue reading }

artwork { Cy Twombly, Poems to the Sea, 1959 }

According to a report in the March issue of The Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 54 percent of men and 42 percent of women are unhappy with the frequency of sex in their long-term relationships.

A prime reason that couples go out of sync sexually lies in the brain’s reward circuitry. It’s a set of mechanisms that work together to drive all motivation, libido, appetite, and—when out of kilter—addiction. Therefore, it governs your attraction (or lack thereof) to each other between the sheets. It works subconsciously, which is why neither of you can will yourself to enjoy sex if the magic isn’t happening.

{ Good Men Project | Continue reading }

In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she didn’t work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. “My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she says. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training.

Previous studies have found that Buddhist monks, who have spent tens of thousands of hours of meditating, have different patterns of brain activity. But Anderson wanted to know if they could see a change in brain activity after a shorter period.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading | Related: Meditation as cheap, self-administered morphine }

Why does exercise make us happy and calm? (…) How, at a deep, cellular level, exercise affects anxiety and other moods has been difficult to pin down. The brain is physically inaccessible and dauntingly complex. But a recent animal study from researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health provides some intriguing new clues into how exercise intertwines with emotions, along with the soothing message that it may not require much physical activity to provide lasting emotional resilience.

{ NYT | Continue reading }

photo { T. Harrison Hillman }

Amazon.com made waves in March when it announced Cloud Player, a new “cloud music” service that allows users to upload their music collections for personal use. It did so without a license agreement, and the major music labels were not amused. Sony Music said it was keeping its “legal options open” as it pressured Amazon to pay up.

In the following weeks, two more companies announced music services of their own. Google, which has long had a frosty relationship with the labels, followed Amazon’s lead; Google Music Beta was announced without the Big Four on board. But Apple has been negotiating licenses so it can operate iCloud with the labels’ blessing.

The different strategies pursued by these firms presents a puzzle. Either Apple wasted millions of dollars on licenses it doesn’t need, or Amazon and Google are vulnerable to massive copyright lawsuits. All three are sophisticated firms that employ a small army of lawyers, so it’s a bit surprising that they reached such divergent assessments of what the law requires.

So how did it happen? And who’s right?

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

Why does music elevate your mood, move you to tears or make you dance? It’s a mystery to most of us, but not so much to evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi.

My research suggests that when we listen to music without any visual component, our auditory system—or at least the lower-level auditory areas—”thinks” it is the sounds of a human moving in our midst, doing some sort of behavior, perhaps an emotionally expressive behavior.

The auditory system “thinks” this because music has been “designed” by cultural evolution to sound like people moving about. That is, over time, humans figured out how to better and better make sounds that mimicked (and often exaggerated) the fundamental kinds of sounds humans make when we move.

I lay out more than 40 respects in which music sounds like people doing stuff. At the core of “moving people” is the walk. The human gait has unique characteristics, from its regularly repeating step (the beat) to the sounds of other parts of the body during the gait that are in time with the step (notes, more generally).

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

A gentle touch on the arm can be surprisingly persuasive. Consider these research findings. Library users who are touched while registering, rate the library and its personnel more favourably than the non-touched; diners are more satisfied and give larger tips when waiting staff touch them casually; people touched by a stranger are more willing to perform a mundane favour; and women touched by a man on the arm are more willing to share their phone number or agree to a dance.

Why should this be? Up until now research in this area has been exclusively behavioural: these effects have been observed, but we don’t really know why. Now a study has made a start at understanding the neuroscience of how touch exerts its psychological effects. (…)

The most important finding is that a touch on the arm enhanced the brain’s response to emotional pictures.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Female sexuality is particularly enigmatic, simply because the sex function in women is so much more complex than that of their male counterparts. A study conducted by Dutch scientist Gert Holstege showed that while the areas in male brains activated during orgasm were not surprising, the activated areas in the female brains were slightly different. For one, the female brain becomes noticeably silent in certain areas, like in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, two areas in the brain that process feelings and thoughts associated with self-control and social judgement. Holstege noted that “at the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.” (…)

Even women in good health have a difficult time achieving climax. Reportedly, 10% of women have never had an orgasm, and as many as 50% of women have trouble being aroused.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

Imagine you are a single, heterosexual woman. You meet a nice man at the driving range, or on a blind date. You like him and he likes you. You date, you get engaged, you get married. You decide to have a child together, so you go off the pill. One morning you wake up and look at your husband, and it’s like seeing him through new eyes. Who is this stranger you married, and what did you ever see in him?

After some articles made the news when they suggested mate preferences change on hormonal contraception, this seemed to be the scenario in the heads of many women. Is my pill deceiving me? What if my birth control is making me date the wrong man?

Several articles over the years have demonstrated that women prefer men with more masculine features at midcycle, or ovulation, and more feminine features in less fertile periods. Based on body odor, women and men also often prefer individuals with MHC (major histocompatibility complex) that are different from theirs, which may be a way for them to select mates that will give their offspring an immunological advantage. These findings have been replicated a few times, looking at a few different gendered traits. And as I suggested above, other work has suggested that the birth control pill, which in some ways mimics pregnancy, may mask our natural tendency to make these distinctions and preferences, regarding both masculinity and MHC.

{ Context and Variation | Continue reading }

image { Thanks Glenn! }

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, the causes of which are not yet well understood. It afflicts about 1% of the population, typically emerging in late adolescence or early adulthood. Neuroimaging and functional testing identify diminished brain volume in key areas and declining cognitive and social functioning at the time that symptoms of the disease emerge. After onset, the symptoms persist, although their intensity fluctuates and some long-term research has identified patients in whom symptoms have dissipated many years after onset. Psychotropic drugs relieve symptoms such as hallucinations and paranoid delusions for some patients, but they have no effect on cognitive or social functioning.

{ Housing and Mental Illness | Harvard University Press | Continue reading }

artwork { Izumi Kato }

Songs sound less sad when you’re older

Music is a powerful tool of expressing and inducing emotions. Lima and colleagues aimed at investigating whether and how emotion recognition in music changes as a function of ageing. Their study revealed that older participants showed decreased responses to music expressing negative emotions, while their perception of happy emotions remained stable.

{ Nou Stuff | Continue reading }

Long before we communicated with language, we communicated with our bodies, especially our faces. Everyone knows we ‘talk’ with facial expressions, but do we ‘hear’ ourselves with them?

{ Thoughts on Thoughts | Continue reading }

The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each emulating human responses. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2. Trisha Donnelly }