Featured series 
Tag: Behavior
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Nation & World
Link between deep sleep and visual learning
A relationship has been observed between deep sleep and the ability of the brain to learn specific tasks. Researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have now shown that the processes that regulates deep sleep may affect visual learning. These results are published in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
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Nation & World
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.
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Nation & World
Suicide risk factors consistent globally
Risk factors for suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts are consistent across countries, and include having a mental disorder and being female, younger, less educated, and unmarried. So says new research from Harvard University and World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health Survey Initiative. The study examined both the prevalence and the risk factors for suicide…
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Nation & World
Slow reading in dyslexia is tied to disorganized brain tracts
Dyslexia marked by poor reading fluency — slow and choppy reading — may be caused by disorganized, meandering tracts of nerve fibers in the brain, according to researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Their study, using the latest imaging methods, gives researchers a glimpse of what may go wrong…
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Nation & World
Brain systems less coordinated with age
Some brain systems become less coordinated with age even in the absence of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study from Harvard University. The results help to explain why advanced age is often accompanied by a loss of mental agility, even in an otherwise healthy individual.
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Nation & World
The importance of early education
Forty-six years ago, a working-class town in Michigan began a program that changed lives. “Mind-blowing,” one scholar called it at Harvard last week.
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Nation & World
A smaller world, but not more intimate
Our increasingly interconnected world has made it easier for information and disease to spread. However, a new study from Harvard University and Cornell University shows that fewer “degrees of separation” can make social networks too weak to disseminate behavioral change. The finding that “small world” networks are limited in their power to shape individual behavior…
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Nation & World
Researchers track down arthritis gene
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have discovered a gene involved in rheumatoid arthritis, a painful inflammation that affects 2.1 million Americans and which can destroy cartilage and bone within the afflicted joint.
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Nation & World
Routine screening test examines substance abuse prevalence among teens
Approximately 15 percent of teens receiving routine outpatient medical care in a New England primary care network had positive results on a substance abuse screening test, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
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Nation & World
Steven Pinker’s ‘Ideas on the Fringe’
Not long ago, Steven Pinker appeared on “The Colbert Report.” He managed to explain the functioning of the human brain to Stephen Colbert in only five words: “Brain cells fire in patterns.”
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Nation & World
Mahzarin Banaji looks at biology of bias
Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist, studies how people think, and how they think they relate to one another. She’s an expert in the little secrets we all have: those implicit attitudes — sometimes prejudicial — regarding race, age, gender, and similar territories of otherness.
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Nation & World
Ulrich explains that well-behaved women should make history
Most bumper sticker slogans do not originate in academic publications. However, in the 1970s, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich penned in a scholarly article about the funeral sermons of Christian women that “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The phrase subsequently gained wide popularity, appearing on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items — and it’s now the title…
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Nation & World
Alexander H. Leighton of School of Public Health dies at 99
Professor Alexander H. Leighton, first chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences (now part of the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health) at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), passed away on Aug. 11 at his home in Nova Scotia, Canada. He was 99.
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Nation & World
Primates expect others to act rationally
When trying to understand someone’s intentions, nonhuman primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers…
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Nation & World
Seeing the forest, from the trees
Alain Houle thinks higher-status chimpanzees likely feed on more, higher-quality fruit — found higher up in the tree — than lower-status chimpanzees, which leads to the chimps being in better physical shape and greater breeding success. “I thought I’d be killed,” Houle said later. “They climbed up, looked at me, barked at me, and then…
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Nation & World
Seven deadly sins on collision course with market forces
Using the seven deadly sins to examine corporate social responsibility, Kennedy School Professor Herman “Dutch” Leonard explained that today’s market-based economy exploits behavior that is deeply embedded in man’s evolutionary history.