Featured series 
Tag: Department of Psychology
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Campus & Community
Not unusual to forget childhood sexual abuse
When questioned closely by psychologists from Harvard University about their feelings, victims of childhood sexual abuse revealed some surprising impressions.
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Campus & Community
‘Face-blindness’ disorder may not be so rare
Researchers at Harvard University and University College London have developed diagnostic tests for prosopagnosia, a socially disabling inability to recognize or distinguish faces. They’ve already used the new test and a related Web site (http://www.faceblind.org) to identify hundreds of “face-blind” individuals, far more than scientists had identified previously. The researchers, led by Ken Nakayama and…
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Campus & Community
Bad times make for more accurate memories
Pleasurable experiences are more fun to relive than negative ones, but a new study by psychologists at Harvard University reveals that memories of good times can be less accurate than those of bad times.
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Campus & Community
Monkey see, monkey infer
Monkeys keep turning out to be smarter than people think they are. Researchers have shown that they can count to four and are aware of differences between languages like Dutch and Japanese, even though they don’t known what is being said. Now, Harvard psychologists find that monkeys can draw correct conclusions about novel situations. For…
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Campus & Community
Alien abduction claims explained
Abduction stories are strikingly similar. Victims wake up and find themselves paralyzed, unable to move or cry out for help.
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Health
Which comes first, language or thought?
“Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects,” says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. “These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later.” Because languages differ in how they approach objects, many scientists suspected that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language. That’s wrong,…
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Health
Newly identified gene linked to brain development
Bilateral frontoparietal polymicrogyria (BFPP) is a recessive genetic disorder resulting in severely abnormal architecture of the brain’s frontal lobes, as well as milder involvement of parietal and posterior parts of the cerebral cortex, which is “the part of the brain that distinguishes humans from other species,” says the study’s senior author, Christopher A. Walsh, M.D.,…
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Campus & Community
The brains behind writer’s block
“It’s likely that writing and other creative work involve a push-pull interaction between the frontal and temporal lobes,” Harvard Medical School neurology instructor Alice Flaherty speculates. If the temporal lobe activity holds sway, an aspiring scribe may turn out 600 logorrheic pages. If the temporal lobes are restrained by frontal lobe changes, the result might…
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Campus & Community
Scientists pursue happiness
“When we try to predict what will make us happy we’re often wrong,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. “Researchers all over the world find the same predictable errors, whether the pursuit involves romance, a new car, or a sumptuous meal.” Gilbert uses the results of his study of election outcomes…
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Health
Monkeys unable to master grammar crucial to human language
Grammar is essentially a system of rules for taking a finite set of discrete elements and combining them into a limitless range of novel expressions. For humans, grammar cobbles together words to create sentences. There is no evidence that animals have a similar system to produce sequences of calls with more expressive meaning. Together with…
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Health
The links between creativity, intelligence, and mental illness
“Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked, particularly in artists, musicians, and writers,” notes Shelley Carson, a Harvard psychologist. “Our research results indicate that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought predispose people to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishments under others.” Carson,…
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Campus & Community
What can monks teach scientists?
People tested by Harvard Psychology Professor Stephen Kosslyn and his colleagues have found it difficult to hold a simple image in their minds for more than 10 seconds. However, Buddhists who excel at mental imagery claim that they can hold vivid three-dimensional images of complex objects, like a palace or deity, in their minds for…
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Health
Emotions change with direction
If someone looks directly at you with an angry expression, you usually assume that person is mad at you. If she or he looks away, you become unsure. The person may be angry with someone or something else. In the latter case, the emotional part of your brain shows more activity. With fear, it’s the…
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Science & Tech
Researchers debate origin of language
Birds sing, chimps grunt, and whales whistle, but those sounds fall far short of expressing the richness of their experiences. Their lack of language goes to the question of why humans have it but no other animals do. That question in turn leads to two major theories of the origin of language. One is the…
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Health
Long-term memory not fixed until after age one
When does long-term memory develop? This was a natural question for Conor Liston, a Harvard senior, and his mentor Jerome Kagan, Starch Research Professor of Psychology. Liston conducted experiments under Kagan’s supervision, and they came up with an answer. “Our findings suggest that children have great difficulty recalling the past before the end of the…
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Health
Starship memories
Psychologists are at odds over the idea that people can forget traumatic events then “recover” intact memories of the trauma years later. On one side are clinicians, who observe that painful memories can be repressed, banished from a trauma survivor’s consciousness until they’re “recovered” with the help of certain psychotherapeutic techniques in adulthood. Memory researchers,…
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Health
Alien abduction claims examined
Richard McNally, a Harvard professor of psychology, and his colleagues recruited six women and four men who claimed they had been spirited away by extraterrestrials, some of them more than once.
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Health
Researchers face up to liars
What category of people do you think would be best at detecting lies? It’s not Secret Service agents, or psychiatrists, or even mothers. Investigators working at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have found that aphasics — people who, because of stroke or other forms of brain damage, have been robbed of their ability to understand…
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Science & Tech
Differences between vowels and consonants are real
While working with colleagues in Rome, two Harvard researchers serendipitously met two women with intriguing speech deficits. As the result of a stroke, one patient could not reproduce the sounds of vowels properly. Another patient experienced the same trouble with consonants. After studying the two women, the Harvard team concluded that the difference between vowels…