You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'psychology' category.
…this bad? From yesterday’s NYT:
[Scientology staffers] signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.
…The defectors say [Scientology staff] were repeatedly beaten by the church’s chairman, David Miscavige, often during planning meetings; pressured to have abortions; forced to work without sleep on little pay; and held incommunicado if they wanted to leave.
Part of a great slideshow of Scientology photos by the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/03/05/us/0303SCIENTOLOGY_index.html
Read the whole thing for more unbelievable details — the church stole its staffers’ passports, forced them to do menial labor, separated husband and wife… The exposé is timed perfectly for Oscar night. I hope this stirs up lots of drama for Cruise, Travolta, and the rest of the Hollywood crazies who continuously defend this bullshit.
(Hat tip: Steve Silberman, who also points to the St. Petersburg Times’ five-part series on Scientology)
Canines and humans get many of the same diseases, and often respond to the same drug treatments. Dogs also tend to mimic the symptoms and pathology of human disease much more closely than rodents do.
“Understanding the underlying genetics in dogs is almost certain to enlighten us about the human condition,” notes Elaine Ostrander, chief of the Cancer Genetics Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Because dogs are purposely inbred for specific traits and are extremely well characterized, scientists have long used their pedigrees to study cancer and other biological diseases. But researchers are just beginning to use dogs as models of psychiatric and behavioral conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and autism.
In a January report, for instance, scientists pinpointed a genetic hotspot for compulsive behavior by screening a conspicuous subgroup of Doberman Pinschers: those that repetitively suck their flanks. The findings were published in Biological Psychiatry.
The gene may also drive compulsive behaviors in other dog breeds and other species, the researchers say.
“We think this gene will also be the same one involved in human OCD,” notes investigator Nicholas Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at Tufts University in Massachusetts. “This is really just the beginning of using [dog] behaviors to study behaviors of humans.”
Paintings of trees with spindly brown branches and plump green leaves cover the walls. Books, plastic cars and coloring books spill out across the carpeted floor and fill several plastic bins.
The children who come here are as young as 3 months on their first visit, and return every few months to participate in a battery of tests of their social behavior and perceptual processing — the brain’s response to non-social stimuli, such as looking at an ordinary object.
About one in four of these children is particularly interesting to the researchers: They are the younger siblings of children with autism, and are much more likely to develop the disorder than are those without a family history of it. Over the past few years, scientists have gathered heaps of behavioral data from these so-called ‘baby sibs’, but the Baby Lab is among the first to look for distinct signatures of brain activity.
The volume measurements of some areas seem to depend on the depth of nearby grooves. This unexpected finding could help explain the mixed results of previous studies measuring structural brain differences in people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases, according to unpublished data presented today at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.
That’s what I asked Tracy Bale, neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, yesterday at a morning session at SfN. Bale studies how maternal stress during pregnancy might lead to neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia or autism. Check out a video of her answer, or the other SfN conference reports on SFARI.org.
In fact, when their parents play copycat — by immediately mimicking the kids’ gestures or playing with an identical toy, for example — some children with autism suddenly take notice, making eye contact, smiling and speaking more.
A new study on monkeys shows that the animals not only pay attention to imitative play, but prefer to interact with people who show it — suggesting that this impulse is deeply ingrained in innate primate social behavior.
Surprisingly, though, most experts don’t consider these issues core features of the disorder. One reason is that no one has definitively calculated the extent to which these behaviors crop up in people with autism. Even if a high prevalence were confirmed, sensory impairments could simply be secondary consequences of a more fundamental deficit, such as a problem with attention or an aversion to social interactions.
But last week, a group of Australian researchers reported that these symptoms are probably universal among children on the autism spectrum. Their study also found that some children show both high and low sensitivities, and that specific combinations of sensory symptoms tend to arise more frequently than others.
A behavioral study published earlier this month suggests a curious addition to the list: anorexia nervosa.
But on a less well-known test of general intelligence, people with autism perform surprisingly well — with accuracy equal to and speeds up to 40 percent faster than those of healthy controls, says a study published this week.
New Scientist pointed me to a contest, run by neuroscientists, of the best new visual illusions. Definitely worth checking out if you have some procrastinating to do today. This one’s my favorite. It was created by Richard Russell, a psychology postdoc at Harvard:
In the Illusion of Sex, two faces are perceived as male and female. However, both faces are actually versions of the same androgynous face. One face was created by increasing the contrast of the androgynous face, while the other face was created by decreasing the contrast. The face with more contrast is perceived as female, while the face with less contrast is perceived as male. The Illusion of Sex demonstrates that contrast is an important cue for perceiving the sex of a face, with greater contrast appearing feminine, and lesser contrast appearing masculine.
