BrainBlog

Recently, from The Telegraph : Prof. Richard Gregory of the University of Bristol

Kashdan TB, & Rottenberg J. Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review. 2010 Mar 12. Traditionally, positive emotions and thoughts, strengths, and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for belonging, competence, and autonomy have been seen as the cornerstones of psychological health. Without disputing their importance, these foci fail to capture many of the fluctuating, conflicting forces that are readily apparent when people navigate the environment and social world. In this paper, we review literature to offer evidence for the prominence of psychological flexibility in understanding psychological health. Thus far, the importance of psychological flexibility has been obscured by the isolation and disconnection of research conducted on this topic. Psychological flexibility spans a wide range of human abilities to: recognize and adapt to various situational demands; shift mindsets or behavioral repertoires when these strategies ...

A feature article in today's New York Times : Promoting the Car Phone, Despite Risks By MATT RICHTEL The New York Times Published: December 7, 2009 "Industry pioneers have long been aware of the risks of multitasking behind the wheel, but still marketed cellphones to drivers." Read the article

New in the world of pig cognition research, interesting results: Pigs Prove to Be Smart, if Not Vain By NATALIE ANGIER The New York Times Published: November 10, 2009 "Recent discoveries from the nascent study of pig cognition offered evidence that pigs were quick learners, slow to forget and similar to humans in many ways." Read the article

The Short Life of a Diagnosis By SIMON BARON-COHEN, Op-Ed Contributor The New Yotk Times Published: November 10, 2009 "Asperger syndrome and autism should be thoroughly tested before being lumped together in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." Read the Op-Ed piece

From The Guardian : Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms', claims study Subjects who had just read Kafka's The Country Doctor were better at recognising patterns in grammar test, psychologists found Alison Flood guardian.co.uk Thursday 17 September 2009 14.59 BST [snip] Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms which oversee implicit learning functions. The psychologists showed a group of subjects Kafka's story The Country Doctor, a disturbing and surreal tale in which a doctor travels by "unearthly horses" to an ill patient, only to climb into bed naked with him and then escape through the window "naked, exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages". A second group were shown the same story, but rewritten so the plot made more sense. Both groups were then asked to complete an artificial g...

Looking for reading material for a longish train trip I am about to take, I decided to hit to bookshelves of my Square's Barnes & Noble to see what popular neuroscience titles might be a good diversion (as well as potential supplementary 'lighter' references, should I re-teach an introductory course to neuroscience sometime over the next year). I chose three. The first is by Elkhonon Goldberg, a revision of an earlier work, which is titled "The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World" and is available in paperback by Oxford University Press. I first met the author when I was a graduate student, so I am looking forward to reading up on what he's been up to. The second is about glial cells and is entitled, "The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia" by Andrew Koob. Five years ago, if someone said there would be a popular offering about glia, I would have thought 'Yeah, right...' Though I do enjoy adding discussion about glia to my...

Hojat, Mohammadreza; Vergare, Michael J.; Maxwell, Kaye; Brainard, George; Herrine, Steven K.; Isenberg, Gerald A.; Veloski, Jon; Gonnella, Joseph S. The Devil is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School Academic Medicine , September 2009 - Volume 84 - Issue 9 - pp 1182-1191. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3181b17e55 The full text of this research paper is available at: Click here This issue of Academic Medicine includes additional commentary and research papers on the topic of empathy, available as courtesy full-text downloads.

Settling in in my coffeehouse for a reading of an interesting new publication by Dr. Brian Brooks and his colleagues on the topic of "Minimizing Misdiagnosis: Psychometric Criteria for Possible or Probable Memory Impairment." The authors seek to develop new psychometric criteria for identification of memory problems in older individuals. This has both clinical and research implications; my primary interest at this time is the accuracy of such identification for including or excluding individuals in clinical trials that test potential drug treatments for Alzheimer's and related dementias.

From a National Institutes of Health (NIH) press release: Imitation Promotes Social Bonding in Primates Capuchin Monkeys Predisposed Toward Individuals Who Imitate Them Imitation, the old saying goes, is the sincerest form of flattery. It also appears to be an ancient interpersonal mechanism that promotes social bonding and, presumably, sets the stage for relative strangers to coalesce into groups of friends, according to a study by a team of scientists at the National Institutes of Health and two Italian research institutions. The study authors found that capuchin monkeys preferred the company of researchers who imitated them to that of researchers who did not imitate them. The monkeys not only spent more time with their imitators, but also preferred to engage in a simple task with them even when provided with the option of performing the same task with a non-imitator. Read the full press release

The blog Brain Ethics posted a blog entry last month with links to several YouTube videos of historical figures in neuroscience and psychology: Read Brain Ethics post here

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Bethesda, MD http://www.nichd.nih.gov/ The Rose F. Kennedy University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Bronx, NY http://www.aecom.yu.edu/cerc/kennedy.htm

Dr. Ed Vogel of the University of Oregon on Distraction and The Brain , a short YouTube video:

A very interesting paper about classical conditioning. Enjoy. If you are a student, you might also see this referred to as Pavlovian conditioning ... Makoto Mizunami, Sae Unoki, Yasuhiro Mori, Daisuke Hirashima, Ai Hatano, & Yukihisa Matsumoto. (2009). Roles of octopaminergic and dopaminergic neurons in appetitive and aversive memory recall in an insect. BMC Biology, 7:46 [doi:10.1186/1741-7007-7-46] Published: 4 August 2009 Abstract, with link to full BioMedCentral paper Abstract (provisional) Background In insect classical conditioning, octopamine (the invertebrate counterpart of noradrenaline) or dopamine has been suggested to mediate reinforcing properties of appetitive or aversive unconditioned stimulus, respectively. However, the roles of octopaminergic and dopaminergic neurons in memory recall have remained unclear. Results We studied the roles of octopaminergic and dopaminergic neurons in appetitive and aversive memory recall in olfactory and visual conditioning in cric...

Mark Rosenzweig, pioneer in brain plasticity, learning and hearing, has died at 86 UCBerkeley News By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | 03 August 2009 Read the full report BERKELEY — Mark R. Rosenzweig, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, whose early studies paved the way for today's recognition of the brain's ability to grow and repair itself, died July 20 at his home in Berkeley from kidney failure. He was 86. A prolific researcher, writer and French-speaking internationalist, Rosenzweig collaborated with some of the greatest minds in neuropsychology at Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France. At UC Berkeley, Rosenzweig collaborated with biochemist Ed Bennett, psychologist David Krech and neuroanatomist Marian Diamond on studies that provided early evidence of brain plasticity - the now-well established notion that neural pathways change throughout our lives as we grow and learn. In additio...

Here is a webpage from the University of Florida ( click here ) that will be of interest to neuropsychologists, if only because it includes some cool photographs (as a profession, neuropsychology seems to be on the slim side when it comes to available photographs of persons and places). Enjoy graduate school and early-career pictures and stories of some fine neuropsychologists! And, as an added treat, some additional photographs ( click here ) of a fine neuropsychologist and his friends and colleagues, posted online by one of them.

Bits: If You’re Happy and You Know It, Tell Your Phone By Jenna Wortham Published: July 29, 2009 A Harvard graduate student is surveying iPhone users to help answer an age-old question: What makes people happy? click here to read

Here's a link to a Neuropsychology Special Interest Group, part of the Psychological Society of Ireland: click here

The British Psychological Society's (BPS) Research Digest blog has an interesting post about a study that concerns itself with giving route directions: link

Jensen MP, Mardekian J, Lakshminarayanan M, & Boye ME. Validity of 24-h recall ratings of pain severity: Biasing effects of "Peak" and "End" pain. Pain. 2008 Jul 15; 137(2): 422-427. Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Box 356490, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA 98195-6490, USA. Despite the frequent use of pain recall ratings in clinical research, there remains doubt about the ability of individuals to accurately recall their pain. In particular, previous research indicates the possibility that the most pain experienced during a recall period and the most recent pain experienced (known as peak and end effects, respectively) might bias recall ratings. The current study used data from a published clinical trial to determine the relative validity of a 24-h recall rating of average post-operative pain and the nature and extent of any biasing influence of peak and end effects on nine separate 24-h recall ratings. The results supported a...