Social Science posts
- November 23, 2009
- 07:53 PM
- 592 views
Genes Don't Make You Racist
by Daniel Hawes in Ingenious Monkey | 20-two-5
In conditioning experiments, humans learn the fear of snakes more easily than they learn to be afraid flowers., and there is an evolutionary story to be told for this.
In a similar experiment, participants show strong outgroup bias in learning fear responses based on other people's skin color; which has sometimes been cited as support for the innateness of negative predispositions towards people who are "different" from ourselves. Luckily, a scientifically more appealing, explanations exist........... Read more »
Tiago V. Maia. (2009) Fear Conditioning and Social Groups: Statistics, Not Genetics. Cognitive Science, 33(7), 1232-1251. info:/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01054.x
- November 23, 2009
- 02:24 PM
- 914 views
Brain Damage, Pedophilia, and the Law
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
An intriguing and tragic story of brain damage is reported in the latest issue of Neurocase: Klüver-Bucy syndrome, hypersexuality, and the law.The authors are Devinsky, Sacks, and Devinsky - Sacks being neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks. Their anonymous patient, a 51 year old married American man, is currently serving a jail sentence for downloading child pornography. But he's not your average pedophile.The man's problems began at the age of 19 when he -first suffered attacks of déjà vu........ Read more »
Devinsky J, Sacks O, & Devinsky O. (2009) Kluver-Bucy syndrome, hypersexuality, and the law. Neurocase : case studies in neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, and behavioural neurology, 1-6. PMID: 19927260
- November 22, 2009
- 07:35 AM
- 813 views
Another Drug to Treat Drug Addiction
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
Today I was going to blog this paper, which says that you can predict which kids will grow up and be criminals by measuring their Pavlovian fear conditioning at age 8. In Mauritius. But The Last Psychiatrist already said everything I was going to.Luckily, there's another article in the American Journal of Psychiatry about crime in a tropical country for me to write about - Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Vigabatrin for the Treatment of Cocaine Dependence in Mexican Parolees........ Read more »
Brodie, J., Case, B., Figueroa, E., Dewey, S., Robinson, J., Wanderling, J., & Laska, E. (2009) Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Vigabatrin for the Treatment of Cocaine Dependence in Mexican Parolees. American Journal of Psychiatry, 166(11), 1269-1277. DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.08121811
- November 20, 2009
- 10:35 AM
- 874 views
Do atheists make better parents?
I've done a few posts recently about fertility, so how about the next stage, parenthood? How do non-religious parents differ from religious ones?Here's a study by Bart Duriez, from the Catholic University Leuven in Belgium, which looks into just that. He quizzed over 900 secondary school students in Belgium about their religious attitudes and their parents approaches to parenting. He also asked their parents the same questions.Duriez used a rather nifty measure of religion, specially developed ........ Read more »
Duriez, B., Soenens, B., Neyrinck, B., & Vansteenkiste, M. (2009) Is Religiosity Related to Better Parenting?: Disentangling Religiosity From Religious Cognitive Style. Journal of Family Issues, 30(9), 1287-1307. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X09334168
- November 19, 2009
- 03:58 AM
- 1,298 views
A model of executive functioning and stress regulation
by Adiemusfree in Healthskills: Skills for Healthy Living
I’m a visual kind of girl, I need to see a diagram to help me conceptualise how the things I’ve been writing about recently all fit together. I’ve been looking at the various aspects of self regulation, emotions and executive functions and how this affects and is affected by stressors, of which chronic pain [...]... Read more »
Williams, P., Suchy, Y., & Rau, H. (2009) Individual Differences in Executive Functioning: Implications for Stress Regulation. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 37(2), 126-140. DOI: 10.1007/s12160-009-9100-0
- November 18, 2009
- 03:40 PM
- 439 views
Media Attention May Indirectly Fuel Drug Abuse
by Michael Long in Phased
John Brownstein (Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston) and coworkers have documented that deaths by opioid abuse in the United States peak between two and six months after peaks in media reports on opioid abuse. This news feature was written on November 18, 2009.... Read more »
Dasgupta, N., Mandl, K. D., & Brownstein, J. S. (2009) Breaking the News or Fueling the Epidemic? Temporal Association between News Media Report Volume and Opioid-Related Mortality. PLoS ONE, 4(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007758
- November 18, 2009
- 01:02 PM
- 1,021 views
Stress: The final frontier (executive functions)
by Adiemusfree in Healthskills: Skills for Healthy Living
It’s visceral. Stress – hits you in the guts. Some of us cope well, some of us don’t – some of our stress lingers, sometimes it’s just the little things, those ‘daily hassles’ that end up tripping the switch. And I don’t think anyone would disagree that chronic pain is an enormous stressor. [...]... Read more »
Williams, P., Suchy, Y., & Rau, H. (2009) Individual Differences in Executive Functioning: Implications for Stress Regulation. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 37(2), 126-140. DOI: 10.1007/s12160-009-9100-0
- November 17, 2009
- 02:29 PM
- 1,039 views
Mitigating supply chain disruptions is easy
by Jan Husdal in husdal.com
How could I have missed this paper? I was preparing my 2009-lecture on supply chain risk for tomorrow and while looking for some YouTube videos on supply chain risk to spice up my 3-hour presentation, I came across a short snippet featuring Christopher Tang from UCLA, who was talking about three strategies for building a [ ... ]... Read more »
Tang, C. (2006) Robust strategies for mitigating supply chain disruptions. International Journal of Logistics, 9(1), 33-45. DOI: 10.1080/13675560500405584
- November 16, 2009
- 01:29 PM
- 1,479 views
Going with the flow: emotion regulation and coping
by Adiemusfree in Healthskills: Skills for Healthy Living
I’m in two minds about attempting to regulate emotions. From ACT, and in particular, mindfulness, I’m learning that trying to control emotions and thoughts is darned near impossible – and unhelpful. From the research on the effect of pain on emotions and subsequently on self regulation, goals and coping, it seems that pain strongly [...]... Read more »
Hamilton, N., Karoly, P., & Kitzman, H. (2004) Self-Regulation and Chronic Pain:The Role of Emotion. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 28(5), 559-576. DOI: 10.1023/B:COTR.0000045565.88145.76
- November 16, 2009
- 02:35 AM
- 1,391 views
Theories of emotion, self-regulation and pain
by Adiemusfree in Healthskills: Skills for Healthy Living
Can chronic pain be a force that shapes how we go about responding to challenges within our environments?
Does chronic pain influence how we feel emotionally about daily activities that contribute to overall goals, and perhaps negatively bias the way we think about the process of setting and achieving goals?
I’ve already concluded that having [...]... Read more »
Hamilton, N., Karoly, P., & Kitzman, H. (2004) Self-Regulation and Chronic Pain:The Role of Emotion. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 28(5), 559-576. DOI: 10.1023/B:COTR.0000045565.88145.76
- November 15, 2009
- 06:01 PM
- 1,329 views
Supply, Demand, and…”Miscellanous” Risk?
by Jan Husdal in husdal.com
The other day I was proofreading the paper of a colleague when this paper in the reference list caught my attention. Not familiar with retail supply chains, here was a chance to learn something new…so I thought, and so I did. However, I’m not sure I follow the authors in their risk categorization: supply, demand and “miscellanous” risk? What is this “miscellanous” risk?
... Read more »
Oke, A., & Gopalakrishnan, M. (2009) Managing disruptions in supply chains: A case study of a retail supply chain. International Journal of Production Economics, 118(1), 168-174. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2008.08.045
- November 13, 2009
- 04:37 PM
- 722 views
Virtual Counterinsurgency
by Randy Borum in Science of Global Security & Armed Conflict
What seems to give the West the most trouble in counterinsurgency (COIN) is not killing bad guys, but preventing new flocks of bad guys from continuously emerging. There is often talk of “draining the swamps” and “stemming the tide,” but violent extremism continues to spread – though in some circles more easily than others. The US and Western allies seem to understand – at some level – that the informational element of the battlespace reaches beyond traditional propaganda. They........ Read more »
Betz, D. (2008) The virtual dimension of contemporary insurgency and counterinsurgency. Small Wars , 19(4), 510-540. DOI: 10.1080/09592310802462273
- November 13, 2009
- 04:27 PM
- 415 views
Looking Back
by teofilo in Follow the Energy
The study of energy production and consumption is based heavily on models and projections from those models. There are a lot of models out there, and they differ from each other to varying degrees based on the assumptions they make. One criticism people often make of these models is that there is too seldom any [...]... Read more »
Sohn, I. (2007) Long-term energy projections: What lessons have we learned?. Energy Policy, 35(9), 4574-4584. DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2007.03.021
- November 12, 2009
- 02:36 PM
- 1,252 views
Emotions and self-regulation in chronic pain
by Adiemusfree in Healthskills: Skills for Healthy Living
I posted about the reciprocal effect of emotions on goal content and today I want to look a little further into this.
A profound statement in the paper by Hamilton, Karoly & Kitzman is this: ‘If emotional well-being influences the selection and the valuation of a particular goal, then it is likely that the relationship between [...]... Read more »
Hamilton, N., Karoly, P., & Kitzman, H. (2004) Self-Regulation and Chronic Pain:The Role of Emotion. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 28(5), 559-576. DOI: 10.1023/B:COTR.0000045565.88145.76
- November 12, 2009
- 05:50 AM
- 593 views
Adaptations for the visual assessment of formadibility: Part II
by Michael Meadon in Ionian Enchantment
In Part I of this series, I summarized the experiments and findings of Aaron Sell and colleagues' paper "Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face". In Part II, I evaluate their claims.
This evidence Sell et. al. present seems compelling with regards to proposition (i): adults appear to be able to make remarkably accurate estimates of upper-body strength from even degraded cues such as static images of faces. As I noted in Part I, howeve........ Read more »
Sell, A., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., Sznycer, D., von Rueden, C., & Gurven, M. (2009) Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276(1656), 575-584. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1177
- November 11, 2009
- 11:42 PM
- 545 views
Small Change
by Journal Watch Online in Journal Watch Online
Expensive nature tourism isn’t necessarily better for local economies
... Read more »
Sandbrook, C. (2009) Local economic impact of different forms of nature-based tourism. Conservation Letters. DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2009.00085.x
- November 11, 2009
- 02:19 PM
- 784 views
"Voodoo" Comments - Relevance Beyond fMRI Studies
by Daniel Hawes in Ingenious Monkey | 20-two-5
Despite the lively debate surrounding Vul's notorious "Voodoo"-Study, I feel that there is still some need for thorough blog treatment of the commentaries accompanying Vul’s paper...here's to address this issue...... Read more »
Yarkoni, T. (2009) Big Correlations in Little Studies: Inflated fMRI Correlations Reflect Low Statistical Power-Commentary on Vul et al. (2009). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(3), 294-298. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01127.x
- November 11, 2009
- 01:15 AM
- 1,242 views
‘What do I do when I’ve had enough’: The Effect of Emotions on Self-regulation & Chronic Pain
by Adiemusfree in Healthskills: Skills for Healthy Living
As soon as read the first paragraph of the paper I’ve used as the basis for this post, I knew I was onto something that resonated with my original occupational therapy values. It says this:
‘Living with chronic pain is a balancing act. People with chronic pain are required to make daily decisions [...]... Read more »
Hamilton, N., Karoly, P., & Kitzman, H. (2004) Self-Regulation and Chronic Pain:The Role of Emotion. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 28(5), 559-576. DOI: 10.1023/B:COTR.0000045565.88145.76
- November 11, 2009
- 12:01 AM
- 594 views
Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability
by Jan Husdal in husdal.com
Another book by someone from ISCRIM? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all, because several of the ISCRIM members have contributed to the chapters in this book, which is well worth taking a closer look at, particularly if risk modeling and decision-making is your field.... Read more »
Blackhurst, J. and Wu, T. (Eds.). (2009) Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers . London: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84882-634-2
- November 10, 2009
- 06:12 AM
- 696 views
Adaptations for the visual assessment of formidability: Part I
by Michael Meadon in Ionian Enchantment
In the last couple of years there has been an explosion in research on faces and what can be inferred from them. It turns out, for example, that you can predict electoral outcomes from rapid and unreflective facial judgments, that women can (partially) determine a man's level of interest in infants from his face alone, that the facial expression of fear enhances sensory acquisition, and much, much else. A particularly interesting addition to this literature is Aaron Sell et. al.'s pape........ Read more »
Sell, A., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., Sznycer, D., von Rueden, C., & Gurven, M. (2009) Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276(1656), 575-584. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1177
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