Psychology Blog

Last year, I was honored to be a finalist in the 2007 Weblog Awards in the Individual Blogger category. I didn’t win, but it was a lot of fun to be included.

This year’s voting is now open.  I’ve yet to check out all the contestants (this is a great way to find new blogs to read), but our friend John Grohol’s World of Psychology is a finalist in the Medical/Health category. Good luck to John!

You can vote once a day–Vote early and often!

Read more from the original source:
Vote for the 2008 Weblog Awards Now

SharpBrains has an interesting interview with neuroscientist Andrew Newberg who discusses his ongoing research into the brain science of meditation.

As we reported last year, research into meditation is really gathering pace and is suggesting that the practice has some immediate and remarkable benefits for our cognitive abilities that are clearly reflected in changes in brain function.

Most of the lab work has focused on how meditation enhances attention while most of the clinical research work on meditation has focused on its ability to prevent relapse in severe depression.

However, Newberg mentions some ongoing work where they’re attempting to apply some of the lab work to boosting cognitive function in people who presumably have dementia or age-related cognitive difficulties:

Scientists are researching, for example, what elements of meditation may help manage stress and improve memory. How breathing and meditation techniques can contribute to health and wellness. For example, my lab is now conducting a study where 15 older adults with memory problems are practicing Kirtan Kriya meditation during 8 weeks, and we have found very promising preliminary outcomes in terms of the impact on brain function. This work is being funded by the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation, but we have submitted a grant request to the National Institute of Health as well.

Also, I just that Time magazine had a special issue on the practice and science of meditation in 2003 which is fully available online, including a funky, if not slightly over-simplified, guide to the neuroanatomy of meditation.

Link to SharpBrains interview with Andrew Newberg.
Link to previous Mind Hacks piece on neuroscience of meditation.
Link to 2003 Time special issue of meditation.

See the original post here:
Meditation and the neuroscience of inner peace

Every year John Brockman of Edge.org poses a question to a diverse group of thinkers and publishes their responses. This year’s question relates to the fact that some technologies or discoveries have changed our lives drastically in the past, and asks people to think about what big development they expect to see in their lifetime [...]

More here:
The Edge question for 2009

In our ongoing discussions of Cacioppo and Patrick’s Loneliness, our daughter Kristin shared some of her thoughts about the disconnect experienced by soldiers, particularly as they deploy and return home again.

Kristin gave a radio interview about the topic:

click to listen to the interview

Our friends at Ashworth University, which serves many students in the military, also found the interview interesting.

Although our experience can hardly compare with that of soldiers stationed abroad, we are missing our Kristin this holiday season. There is a distinct sense of guilt as we enjoy the comforts we have here, knowing that she is in a very different place. We are making long lists of things to do when she returns for the 2009 holiday season. We send packages of homemade goodies and warm socks and even a guitar, hoping to make her deployment a little more comfortable. We luck out on occasion and grab a quick chat with her on Facebook (the time difference is a bit challenging).

Kristin uses some rare downtime to practice her guitar playing

I thought it was a very nice touch to receive a handwritten Christmas card from Kristin’s superior officers. I’m sure these guys are plenty busy, and have families of their own that they were missing, but we really appreciated their taking the time to do this.

Not all soldiers have families who can step forward and help, and it’s just so important that all feel appreciated and supported.  If you want to help soldiers, here are some places to start:

Soldiers’ Angels

This site’s motto is “May No Soldier Go Unloved.” If you want to get involved in supporting the troops, this site gives you many ways to do so.

The USO

West Point Parents

This site has a lot of useful links about everything from how to store a vehicle for 12 months to advice about how to interact with a soldier home on mid-tour leave.

Yes, many of us are facing challenges–financial and otherwise–but these seem trivial compared to the challenges facing soldiers. As Cacioppo and Patrick point out, “extending ourselves” will make us feel better, too!

This is the largest yellow ribbon formation so far–can you beat it?

View original post here:
Loneliness and Deployed Soldiers

I’ve just come across a bombshell of a paper that looked at numerous headline studies on the cognitive neuroscience of social interaction and found that many contained statistically impossible or spurious correlations between behaviour and brain activity.

It’s currently ‘in press’ for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science but the preprint is available online as a pdf file.

Social cognitive neuroscience is a hot new area and many of the headline studies use fMRI brain imaging to look at how activity in the brain is correlated with social decision-making or perception.

This new analysis, led by neuroscientist Edward Vul, was inspired by the fact that some of these correlations seem to good to be true, and so the research team investigated. The abstract of their study is below, and it’s powerful stuff.

If you’re not familiar with neuroimaging research it might be useful to know that what a ‘voxel‘ is before reading the abstract.

Essentially, brain scanners digitally divide the scanned area into a block of tiny boxes and each one of these is called a voxel (think 3D pixel).

This allows the scans to be analysed by comparing the activity or tissue density in each voxel to another measure - which could be the same voxel during another scan, or it could be something entirely different, such as a measure of emotion or social decision-making.

The newly emerging field of Social Neuroscience has drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and measures of brain activation obtained using fMRI. We show that these correlations often exceed what is statistically possible assuming the (evidently rather limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality/emotion measures. The implausibly high correlations are all the more puzzling because social-neuroscience method sections rarely contain sufficient detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained.

We surveyed authors of 54 articles that reported findings of this kind to determine the details of their analyses. More than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for individual voxels, and reports means of just the subset of voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. We show how this non-independent analysis grossly inflates correlations, while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample. In addition, we argue that other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious correlations in some cases.

We outline how the data from these studies could be reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide the field with accurate estimates of the correlations in question. We urge authors to perform such reanalyses and to correct the scientific record.

The paper notes that some of the most widely-reported studies in recent years contain this flaw and this new paper has the potential to really shake up the world of social cognitive neuroscience.

pdf of preprint of ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’.

Read more here:
Voodoo correlations in social brain studies