Brilliant Blog

Psychology:

Scans showed that in only three months, the children’s brains developed three years, Yahoo! News reported. At the same time they displayed remarkable improvements in tests of reading, concentration, problem-solving and memory. One of the boys, who was hooked on television and despised reading turned his behaviour after the research. The boy got hooked up on reading and [...]

A Spanish psychologist met with Cambodia’s “jungle woman” on Tuesday, hoping to unravel some of the mystery surrounding the woman who emerged from the forest, naked and unable to speak, after possibly 18 years in the wild. Hector Rifa, a doctor of psychology from Spain’s University of Oviedo, said his priority was to ensure the woman [...]

Adam Levine may have dumped Jessica Simpson electronically, but most regular folks are inclined to take a higher road when delivering bad news. That’s one of the findings of a new survey about the psychology of communicating. When it comes to breaking up with someone or surrendering other types of negative information, the vast majority of those [...]

Children in low-quality childcare have less advanced language development that progresses at a slower rate than the language development of children in high-quality care despite having similar family environments, according to new researcher from the FPG Child Development Institute (FPG) and the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This new [...]

UCL (University College London) researchers have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain’s attention on a subconscious level. The wider implication for the study, published in Current Biology, is that techniques such as subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but still legal in the USA, certainly do leave [...]

Please do your part to help a starving graduate student. Recruiting willing parents (and kids) is a difficult assignment! Do you (or a friend of yours) have a child between the ages of 5-16?  Could you use a few hours of free babysitting ? Are you interested in helping out a desperate clinical psychology graduate student?  I am [...]

New research findings now appearing online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology began with a professor’s desire to understand why her husband often seemed to ignore her requests for help around the house.”My husband, while very charming in many ways, has an annoying tendency of doing exactly the opposite of what I would like [...]

Northwestern University researchers have discovered men with an unusual form of dementia have a higher rate of vasectomy than men the same age who are cognitively normal. The dementia is Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), a neurological disease in which people have trouble recalling and understanding words. In PPA, people lose the ability to express themselves and [...]

So, Valentine’s Day is Wednesday, but you know he isn’t going to bring you any flowers. And instead of a cuddle and a kiss, you know she is going to dig up that old canard about your mother. Does your relationship feel like an endless rerun of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — Edward Albee’s grim [...]

The wedding day is considered to be the happiest day of many people’s lives.  It also ranks as one of the most stressful.  Invitations.  Flowers.  Catering.  Dresses and tuxedoes. The reception. Putting on a big show - bigger than the Oscars, bigger than the Super Bowl. But ultimately, according to Dr. Dan Clement, associate professor of psychology [...]

While culling essays for her new collection, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” Joan Acocella discovered a loose theme: the hardships that come with creation and how various artists dealt with these obstacles — or did not. The humbler virtues of perseverance, she came to see, are as important, and as laudable, as talent. As she writes [...]

A Tulare County, California, murder case could affect several dozen more around the state where suspects’ exposure to the death penalty depends on their level of mental retardation.State Supreme Court justices now have three months to ponder whether a Delano man’s mental retardation is severe enough to spare him from possible execution and whether prosecutors [...]

If you want to help your kids do better in school, it turns out the best thing might be a little positive thinking. Recently, investigators set out to learn if kids’ beliefs about their intelligence had any effect on their school performance. In one study, they followed 12-year-olds through two years of school.  All of the kids [...]

Charles Murray would rather you didn’t go to college. It probably won’t prepare you for any occupation, and, odds are, you’re not smart enough to benefit from a college education anyway. You shouldn’t feel bad – you were born this way. And those lucky few who form the cognitive elite? Well, their “spread of wealth [...]

Drumming increases heart rate and blood flow just like an aerobic exercise. The process of drumming engages both the linear, (rational left brain) and the creative, (intuitive right brain).  It slows the brain waves to around 8 cycles per second, the exact frequency of the earth.   Improved IQ scores can now officially be added to the [...]

Central Elementary School had early dismissal on March 16, 2004, and as parents waited in the cafeteria for their children, one father saw that his 6-year-old son, walking in line with his class, appeared deeply disturbed. “My son had this look on his face,” said the father, “and when he came to me, I bent down [...]

Theories: Psychoneuromuscular theory: when an athlete practices using imagery the athlete imagines movements without performing them, although the brain interprets this as if the athlete were performing them, which provides similar impulses in the brain and in the muscles. Small impulses fire from your brain to your muscles with the exactness that you are imagining. Cognitive [...]

Bullying is more than a troubling school problem. Given its potential to leave physical and mental scars, some researchers consider bullying to be a major public health concern. Virginia Robinson, in an article dedicated to addressing emerging school health issues writes about a hidden, but equally insidious consequence of bullying. �Rarely discussed is the role of [...]