Danilo Díaz Granados read: Another social psychology classic bites the dust – meta-analysis finds little evidence for the Macbeth effect

Danilo Díaz Granados read: Beyond the invisible gorilla – inattention can also render us numb and anosmic (without smell)

By Emma Young It’s well-known that we can miss apparently obvious objects in our visual field if other events are hogging our limited attention. The same has been shown for sounds: in a nod to Daniel Simons’ and Christopher Chabris’ famous gorilla/basketball study that demonstrated “inattentional blindness”, distracted participants in the first “inattentional deafness” study failed to hear a man walking through an auditory scene for 19 seconds saying repeatedly “I am a gorilla”. Now, two new studies separately show that a very similar effect occurs in relation to touch ( inattentional numbness ) and to smell ( inattentional anosmia ). Sandra Murphy and Polly Dalton (a co-author on the inattentional deafness paper) at Royal Holloway, University of London report in the journal Cognition on inattentional numbness. They wanted to go beyond the way we rapidly tune out ongoing tactile stimulation, like the sensation of our clothes, and explore what happens when we’re tou...

Danilo Díaz Granados read: “Skunk” Cannabis Disrupts Brain Networks – But Effects Are Blocked In Other Strains

By Matthew Warren Over the past decade, neuroimaging studies have provided new insights into how psychoactive drugs alter the brain’s activity. Psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – has been found to reduce activity in brain regions involved in depression , for example, while MDMA seems to augment brain activity for positive memories . Now a new study sheds some light into what’s going in the brain when people smoke cannabis – and it turns out that the effects can be quite different depending on the specific strain of the drug. The research, published recently in the Journal of Psychopharmacology , suggests that cannabis disrupts particular brain networks – but some strains can buffer against this disruption. Cannabis contains two major active ingredients: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). THC is responsible for many of the drug’s psychoactive effects, such as the feeling of being stoned and the anxiety that people sometimes feel, as well as ...

Danilo Díaz Granados read: Many social psychologists are impeded by their ideological aversion to evolutionary psychology

By Christian Jarrett A new survey of beliefs held by social psychologists (335 members of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists) has confirmed previous reports that the field is overwhelmingly populated by researchers of a left-wing, liberal bent. What’s more, David Buss and William von Hippel – the evolutionary psychologists who conducted and analysed the survey – say their findings, published open-access in Archives of Scientific Psychology , suggest that many of these social psychologists are opposed, for ideological reasons, to insights rooted in evolutionary psychology and that this is impeding them from developing a “proper science of social psychology”. Buss and von Hippel add that compounding matters is an irony – the social psychologists’ desire to signal their ideological stance and commitment to others who share their political views, which is a manifestation of the evolved human adaptation to form coalitions. “Part of this virtue signalling entails rejecting a...

Danilo Díaz Granados

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