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Psychology
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Psychology
By: Amy Lavoie/
October 29, 2009
Harvard University study suggests that the pain of torture can make even the innocent appear guilty to those interrogating them.
Building human cooperation: Carrots work better
Rewards go further than punishment in building human cooperation and benefiting the common good, according to research published in the journal Science by researchers at Harvard University and the Stockholm School of Economics.
Psychology Articles
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McLean launches coaching institute
With a $2 million gift from the Harnisch Foundation, Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital recently launched the Institute of Coaching to support coaching-related research, practice, and education.
Outcomes matter more than intention when choosing to punish or reward individuals who’ve caused accidents, according to new research from Harvard University.
Individual primates display variation in general intelligence
Scientists at Harvard University have shown, for the first time, that intelligence varies among individual monkeys within a species – in this case, the cotton-top tamarin.
‘Super-recognizers’ are the ones who really will never forget a face
Some people say they never forget a face, a claim now bolstered by psychologists at Harvard University who’ve discovered a group they call “super-recognizers”: those who can easily recognize someone they met in passing, even many years later.
Raising happy — and moral — children
A teenager tells her parents she is considering quitting her soccer team. Worried that her daughter is unhappy, her mother wants to let her skip practice. Her father argues that soccer is important on her college résumé. While both parents are concerned about their child, they neglect another question entirely: How would her leaving affect the team?
Scholars discuss ‘medicalization’ of formerly normal characteristics
Not long ago, a majority of Americans described themselves as “shy,” a condition of reticence or caution that for ages just seemed natural.
Want a dose of veritas? Even at a place like Harvard, rejection and failure are regular visitors.
Scholars take a look at decision making
Decisions, decisions. We all make them, starting with which side of the bed to get up on in the morning. But on a personal and public scale, many decisions have grave consequences for health, financial well-being, and — true enough — the fate of the planet.
Study: Key to happiness is listen to others
Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person’s experience is often more informative than your own best guess.
A mother’s criticism strikes nerve
Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never-depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies.
Fijian girls succumb to Western dysmorphia
In 1982, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Anne E. Becker was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe when she traveled to Fiji for a summer of anthropology fieldwork. What struck her about this South Pacific island nation — and has in many research trips since — was “the absolute preoccupation with food and eating,” she said. “Family and social life really revolve around food. … It’s all about food, all the time.”
The genes in your congeniality
Can’t help being the life of the party? Maybe you were just born that way. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, have found that our place in a social network is influenced in part by our genes, according to new findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Pain is more intense when inflicted on purpose
Researchers at Harvard University have discovered that our experience of pain depends in part on whether we think someone caused the pain intentionally. Participants in a study who believed they were getting an electrical shock from another person on purpose, rather than accidentally, rated the shock as more painful than those receiving the same shock thinking it was an accident. Participants seemed to get used to shocks that were delivered unintentionally, but those given on purpose had a fresh sting every time.
Indigenous culture clarifies nature and limits of how humans measure
The ability to map numbers onto a line, a foundation of all mathematics, is universal, says a study published in the journal Science, but the form of this universal mapping is not linear but logarithmic.
Nobel Prize winner discusses judgment and intuition
“Most of the time,” said noted psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to a packed house of students, scholars, and faculty at the Yenching Auditorium (April 15), “we run at very low effort.” It was a sobering claim for the heady academic set, but according to Kahneman, no one is immune from the diagnosis. Even those with a high level of intelligence, he said, “don’t check themselves as much as they should.” The researcher was referring to the human tendency to judge things quickly, to go with the familiar or what looks correct instead of giving a question or a problem sufficient attention, reflection, and thought.
Study: Know thyself and you’ll know others better
Using functional MRI (fMRI) scanning, researchers have found that the region of the brain associated with introspective thought “lights up” when people infer the thoughts of others like themselves. However, this is not the case when we’re considering people we think of as different politically, socially, or religiously. Published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was led by Adrianna Jenkins, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, with Jason Mitchell, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard. Jenkins and Mitchell’s co-author was C. Neil Mcrae of the University of Aberdeen.
Punishment doesn’t earn rewards
Individuals who engage in costly punishment do not benefit from their behavior, according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature by researchers at Harvard University and the Stockholm School of Economics.
Gene variants probably increase risk for anxiety disorders
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers — in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University — have discovered perhaps the strongest evidence yet linking variation in a particular gene with anxiety-related traits. In the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, the team describes finding that particular versions of a gene that affects the activity of important neurotransmitter receptors were more common in both children and adults assessed as being inhibited or introverted and also were associated with increased activity of brain regions involved in emotional processing.
‘Attentional collapse’ causes an inability to imagine future satisfaction
Researchers have identified a key reason why people make mistakes when they try to predict what they will like. When predicting how much they will enjoy a future experience, people tend to compare it to its alternatives — that is, to the experiences they had before, might have later, or could be having in the present moment. But when people actually have the experience, they tend not to think about these alternatives and their experience is relatively unaffected by them.
Homing in on features of ‘humaniqueness’
Shedding new light on the cognitive rift between humans and animals, a Harvard University scientist has synthesized four key differences in human and animal cognition into a hypothesis on what exactly differentiates human and animal thought.
Infants are able to recognize quantity
By looking at infant brain activity, researchers have found that babies as young as 3 months old are sensitive to differences in numerical quantity. Additionally, the scientists were able to see that babies process information about objects and numbers in different, dissociated parts of the brain, which is also the case in older children and in adults.
Making statistics not just palatable, but delicious
Money, love, health, innocence or guilt — even finding the right wine. Who doesn’t want to know more? “Real-Life Statistics: Your Chance for Happiness (or Misery),” offered this semester by Harvard’s Department of Statistics, will explore the critical tools to make good judgments in matters large and small.
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Harvard Stem Cell Institute - First 5 years
What has the Harvard Stem Cell Institute accomplished in its first 5 years?
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3:05 run time
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Stem cells: Mending a broken heart?
Video / Oct 15, '09
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