Reframing Emotions to Avoid Stress
“By taking the approach that it is not about you – that an angry person is just having a bad day — you may be able to stave off bad feelings and emotional stress. It’s a common strategy.
For example, you might tell yourself that they’ve probably just lost their dog or gotten a cancer diagnosis and are taking it out on you. This technique is termed emotional reappraisal, a common strategy used in cognitive-behavioral therapy.
A new study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, reviews the concept and suggests areas for future investigation.
Stanford researchers led by Jens Blechert wanted to study the efficiency and speed of reappraising emotions.
Emotions develop in the front part of the brain and move backward in the brain as they are processed. On the other hand, the emotional reappraisal process begins in the back of the brain and moves forward.
“You can see this as a kind of race between the emotional information and the reappraisal information in the brain: Emotional processing proceeds from the back to the front of the brain, and the reappraisal is generated in the front of the brain and proceeds toward the back of the brain where it modifies emotional processing,” Blechert said.
Blechert and his colleagues came up with two experiments to study this process. Participants were shown several series of faces and tested on their reactions.
For example, in one set, they were told to consider that the people they’d seen had had a bad day, but it’s nothing to do you with you.
“So we trained the participants a little bit, not to take this emotion personally, but directed at someone else,” Blechert said.
They found that once people had adjusted their attitude toward someone, they weren’t disturbed by that person’s angry face the next time it appeared.
On the other hand, when participants were told to just feel the emotions brought on by an angry face, they continued to be upset by that face.
A different study used an intriguing approach as researchers recorded electrical brain activity from the scalp and found that reappraising wiped out the signals of the negative emotions people felt when they just looked at the faces.
The findings are significant as psychologists used to think that people had to feel the negative emotion, and then get rid of it.
If these findings are confirmed, the process is actually a much faster and deeper process – given that the people are prepared.
“If you’re trained with reappraisal, and you know your boss is frequently in a bad mood, you can prepare yourself to go into a meeting,” said Blechert. “He can scream and yell and shout but there’ll be nothing [that you feel].”
Continued testing of this hypothesis is required as this study only looked at still pictures of angry faces. In his next experiment, Blechert would like to test how people respond to a video of someone yelling at them.”
Via PsychCentral (Thanks Berber)
Hyperactive Visual Cortex Neurons May Cause Orange “O”s and Purple “P”s
“The colors that letters and numbers appear to a synesthete”
“What’s the News: For most of us, our senses stay relatively separate: that is, we hear what we hear and see what we see. People with synesthesia, however, actually see words as colors, taste a particular flavor when they hear a familiar song, or experience other strong, automatic linkages between senses. The neurological underpinnings of the condition—how the brain connects two usually distinct senses—have remained a mystery. But researchers have now found a possible cause, they reported yesterday: neurons in the area responsible for the second sensation, such as the color that goes with the word, may be unusually excitable.
How the Heck:
Six people with grapheme-color synesthesia—the most common form of the condition, in which people associate letters and numbers with colors—and six non-synesthete controls participated in the study.
The researchers applied transcranial magnetic stimulation, a weak magnetic field that travels through the skull and changes neuronal activity, to each volunteer’s primary visual cortex, a part of the brain that processes what we see. The people with synesthesia needed only a third as much stimulation as the other volunteers before they started seeing phosphenes—the official name for little flashes you see when you rub your eyes or “see stars.” That’s likely because the synesthetes’ visual cortex neurons are already more active, the researchers suggest, so they need less of a boost to fire and make stars.
The scientists then asked the volunteers with synesthesia to describe their experiences while a similar type of brain stimulation— transcranial direct current stimulation—increased or decreased brain activity in their visual cortex. Changing the excitability of neurons there, the team found, impacted how strong people’s synesthetic experiences were.
What’s the Context:
Unusually high activity levels in these neurons could help them form and strengthen connections between senses, the researchers say, while similar connections in most of our brains simply peter out. Since this is just one small study, looking at just six people with synesthesia, more studies using a variety of techniques are needed to investigate the idea.
Other researchers have suggested this tendency to connect two senses could mean that people with synesthesia are better at making connections between other disparate ideas—an idea that has yet to be tested, but is intriguing nonetheless.”
Via Discover Magazine (Thanks Annette)
What it means to donate your brain
“At 92 years old, Albert Webb is wandering through an exhibition in London’s trendy Shoreditch. In the underground warren of rooms, echoes of recorded voices mingle with the sounds of people’s conversations. The occasional burst of laughter bounces around the walls. Wearing a white sweater that he knitted himself, Webb leans in to tell me his story. When he smiles his eyes disappear into thin creases, giving him an air of gleefulness.
A grin may seem an odd response to the question I’ve just asked – why he chose to donate his brain to medical research – but after 17 years participating in a brain study led by the aptly named Carol Brayne of the University of Cambridge, Webb discusses his decision with ease. To him, donation secures a form of immortality.
He explains that he’d knit the sweater he’s wearing many years ago, before he lost his wife Ellen. Knitting was something they had done together. “When she died, I packed it in,” he says. She had dementia toward the end of her life. This Saturday marks the ninth anniversary of her death. They were married for 57 years.
It’s a poignant story in a fitting setting. We are standing in the middle of Mind Over Matter, an exhibition inspired by the research of Brayne and colleagues that is the result of a long collaboration between artist Ania Dabrowska and social scientist Bronwyn Parry. The exhibition focuses on 12 brain donors from Brayne’s studies – the stories of their lives and triumphs, and their reasons for donating.”
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks Annette)
The Obedience Experiments at 50
“This year is the 50th anniversary of the start of Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking experiments on obedience to destructive orders — the most famous, controversial and, arguably, most important psychological research of our times. To commemorate this milestone, in this article I present the key elements comprising the legacy of those experiments.
Milgram was a 28-year-old junior faculty member at Yale University when he began his program of research on obedience, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which lasted from August 7, 1961 through May 27, 1962.
As we know, in his obedience experiments Milgram made the startling discovery that a majority of his subjects — average and, presumably, normal community residents — were willing to give a series of what they believed were increasingly painful and, perhaps, harmful electric shocks to a vehemently protesting victim simply because they were commanded to do so by an authority (although no shock was actually given). They did this despite the fact that the experimenter had no coercive powers to enforce his commands and the person they were shocking was an innocent victim who did nothing to merit such punishment. Although Milgram conducted over 20 variations of his basic procedure, his central finding obtained in several standard, or baseline, conditions was that about two-thirds of the subjects fully obeyed the experimenter, progressing step-by-step up to the maximum shock of 450 volts.
First and foremost, the obedience experiments taught us that we have a powerful propensity to obey authority. Did we need Milgram to tell us this? Of course, not. What he did teach us is just how strong this tendency is — so strong, in fact, that it can make us act in ways contrary to our moral principles.
Milgram’s findings provided a powerful affirmation of one of the main guiding principles of contemporary social psychology: That often it is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we find ourselves in. To perceive behavior as flowing from within — from our character or personality — is to paint an incomplete picture of the determinants of our behavior. Milgram showed that external pressures coming from a legitimate authority can make us behave in ways we would not even consider when acting on our own.”
Continue reading at APS (Thanks Annette)
Turn orange peel into plastic? It’s not as crazy as it sounds
“British scientists are pioneering a novel way of recycling that turns orange peel into plastic.
The technique relies on high-powered microwaves that can degrade the tough cellulose molecules of plant matter so that they release volatile gases that can be collected and distilled into a liquid product.
These valuable biodegradable chemicals can then be used in water purifiers, cleaning agents and plastics. Researchers behind the process say it is 90 per cent efficient and works not just on orange peel but almost any plant-based waste such as straw or coffee grounds.
James Clark, professor of green chemistry at the University of York, said he is building a small demonstrator facility to show the novel recycling scheme can be scaled up in order to suit industrial applications.
“It will be able to cope with tens of kilograms an hour. We believe it is the right scale to prove to people that this is a viable technology,” Professor Clark said.
“You dice the peel and put it into a microwave field. You then focus the microwaves as you would with a domestic microwave oven but at higher power,” he said.
“The microwaves activate the cellulose and that triggers the release of chemicals or further chemical reactions inside the orange peel,” he told the British Science Festival at Bradford University.
Volatile chemicals are released in the process, including d-limonene, which is responsible for the distinctive smell of citrus fruit and is used in cosmetics, the cleaning industry and as a biological insecticide.
“As you produce the volatiles you strip them off continuously. It’s a continuous process. You feed the peel into a microwave zone and have a pipe that takes off the volatile fractions as they are produced,” he said
“The unique feature of our microwave is that we work at deliberately low temperatures. We never go above 200C. You can take the limonene off or you can turn limonene into other chemicals,” he said. “It works really well with waste paper. It can take a big range of bio-waste material.”"
Read more at The Independent
Take the visual Turing test
“The Turing test is the most famous benchmark of artificial intelligence, but it is flawed. Now an addition that gauges a machine’s visual skills has been proposed.
Devised by 20th-century mathematician Alan Turing, the test pits the conversational abilities of chatbots against humans. To pass, judges must be tricked into believing that a bot is human, based only on a typed exchange. But many researchers believe the test is sorely in need of an upgrade.
“It has served its purpose. Now we need Turing Test 2.0,” says Aladdin Ayesh, who organised a symposium entitled Towards a Comprehensive Intelligence Test at the AI and Simulated Biology conference in York, UK, in April.
That’s why Michael Barclay and Antony Galton at the University of Exeter, UK, and colleagues have created a test that asks machines to mimic some of our visual abilities.
Click below to continue to New Scientists interactive feature to try the test yourself.”
Dozy hamsters reverse the ageing process
“People will do almost anything if they think it will help them cheat death. The futurist Ray Kurzweil has utterly transformed his lifestyle in a bid to live until 2050, by when he thinks technology will allow his consciousness to be uploaded into a computer, making him immortal.
His anti-ageing regimen is based on established research that has identified ways to slow the process. Cutting your intake of calories and getting plenty of exercise both seem to help.
One of Kurzweil’s ploys is to get lots of sleep too. In this, he is unwittingly emulating the Djungarian hamster. These rodents use short hibernatory naps to reverse the ageing process.”
Read more at New Scientist
Bill Gates’ advanced power reactor gets closer to reality.
Terrapower, a startup funded in part by Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates, is moving closer to building a new type of nuclear reactor called a traveling wave reactor that runs on an abundant form of uranium. The company sees it as a possible alternative to fusion reactors, which are also valued for their potential to produce power from a nearly inexhaustible source of fuel.
Work on Terrapower’s reactor design began in 2006. Since then, the company has changed its original design to make the reactor look more like a conventional one. The changes would make the reactor easier to engineer and build. The company has also calculated precise dimensions and performance parameters for the reactor. Terrapower expects to begin construction of a 500-megawatt demonstration plant in 2016 and start it up in 2020. It’s working with a consortium of national labs, universities, and corporations to overcome the primary technical challenge of the new reactor: developing new materials that can withstand use in the reactor core for decades at a time. It has yet to secure a site for an experimental plant and surprisingly, the funding to build it.
Full Story at Technology News
Dolphins demonstrate a “remarkable” ability to recover from very serious injury
Washington, DC – A Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) scientist who has previously discovered antimicrobial compounds in the skin of frogs and in the dogfish shark has now turned his attention to the remarkable wound healing abilities of dolphins.
A dolphin’s ability to heal quickly from a shark bite with apparent indifference to pain, resistance to infection, hemorrhage protection, and near-restoration of normal body contour might provide insights for the care of human injuries, says Michael Zasloff, M.D., Ph.D.
“Much about the dolphin’s healing process remains unreported and poorly documented,” says Zasloff. “How does the dolphin not bleed to death after a shark bite? How is it that dolphins appear not to suffer significant pain? What prevents infection of a significant injury? And how can a deep, gaping wound heal in such a way that the animal’s body contour is restored? Comparable injuries in humans would be fatal. ”
Full article at Eurekalert
Trial, error and the God complex (video)
Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems — and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.
