Our Young Brains on Race: How Racial Perceptions Develop

November 2, 2012

How our brains respond to race changes as we develop from children to adolescents, according to a new study on race perception. The researchers found that a child’s social environment plays an important role in developing neural bias to race. The more diversity we are surrounded by at a young […]

Threats, Survival, and Fear: Q&A with Joseph LeDoux

October 25, 2012

With Halloween around the corner, fear may be on your mind. As a basic emotion, fear develops when we react to an immediate danger. Understanding exactly how our brains detect and respond to such danger has been a goal of Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New […]

Do Not Skip that Handshake: How Body Language Shapes Our Judgments

October 19, 2012

We all know that a proper business meeting should start with a handshake but until now, we have not known exactly how much impact that seemingly small gesture can make. Turns out, the impact is substantial, according to new research that examines the neurological and emotional effects of a handshake. […]

Healthy Decisions are Hard to Make: Q&A with Antonio Rangel

October 17, 2012

The reason why making healthy choices feels hard is because it is literally hard work. Scientists are finding that different systems within our brains fiercely compete to assign different values to the choices we make. In a recent study led by Cendri Hutcherson of Caltech, researchers saw this competition at […]

From Age-Related Increase in Distractibility to Why Handshakes Matter

October 13, 2012

What’s new in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Driven to distraction: Age-related differences Older adults are considered more susceptible to distraction while driving in traffic or undertaking other daily activities that require us to keep track of multiple objects at a time. Researchers have understood for some time that this […]

Reshaping How Emotional We Feel About Negative Memories

October 4, 2012

We all have memories that bring us down, whether a bad breakup or a prolonged illness. New research suggests that we can reshape how we emotionally process those negative memories through simple instruction. And for those with the worst memories to process, such as victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), […]

Moving Beyond Mere Blobology: Interview with Steven Pinker

September 27, 2012

CNS recently had the chance to catch up with Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, who was a keynote speaker at the first CNS annual meeting in San Francisco. In that 1994 talk, he gave an overview of the […]

Linking Words and Action in the Brain

September 21, 2012

When an Indirect Statement Becomes a Request for Action We all know that context matters when it comes to language. What we do not know as well, however, is exactly how our brains tell us when to take actions based on words. New research suggests several mechanisms by which, even […]

Mapping the the Extinction of Fear in the Brain

August 20, 2012

Gradually exposing people to the objects they fear can help people overcome phobias of everything from closed spaces to spiders and snakes. In a new study, scientists have observed the changes in the brain that make this so-called “exposure therapy” so effective – revealing the neurological processes underlying our fears […]

The Bonds of Empathy: From Rats to Humans Q&A with Jean Decety

June 22, 2012

Scientists are finding that empathy is not just for humans. It plays a key biological role in other animals too, and in a paper published last December in Science, University of Chicago neuroscientists Peggy Mason, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, and Jean Decety showed that even rats display such pro-social behavior. After […]

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