Study explores how dogs think and learn about human behavior
Can dogs read our minds? How do they learn to beg for food or behave badly primarily when we’re not looking? According to Monique Udell and her team, from the University of Florida in the US, the way that dogs come to respond to the level of people’s attentiveness tells us something about the ways dogs think and learn about human behavior. Their research, published online in Springer’s journal Learning & Behavior, suggests it is down to a combination of specific cues, context and previous experience.
Recent work has identified a remarkable range of human-like social behaviors in the domestic dog, including their ability to respond to human body language, verbal commands, and to attentional states. The question is, how do they do it? Do dogs infer humans’ mental states by observing their appearance and behavior under various circumstances and then respond accordingly? Or do they learn from experience by responding to environmental cues, the presence or absence of certain stimuli, or even human behavioral cues? Udell and colleagues’ work sheds some light on these questions. [continue reading…]
Forget about working crossword puzzles and listening to Mozart. If you want to improve your ability to reason and solve new problems, just take a few minutes every day to do a maddening little exercise called n-back training.
In an award address on May 28 at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Washington, D.C., University of Michigan psychologist John Jonides presented new findings showing that practicing this kind of task for about 20 minutes each day for 20 days significantly improves performance on a standard test of fluid intelligence—the ability to reason and solve new problems, which is a crucial element of general intelligence. And this improvement lasted for up to three months. [continue reading…]
The new edition of a psychiatric manual called DSM-5 tackles what to do when mourning becomes complicated or leads to depression
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Sooner or later most of us suffer deep grief over the death of someone we love. The experience often causes people to question their sanity—as when they momentarily think they have caught sight of their loved one on a crowded street. Many mourners ponder, even if only abstractedly, their reason for living. But when are these disturbing thoughts and emotions normal—that is to say, they become less consuming and intense with the passage of time—and when do they cross the line to pathology, requiring ongoing treatment with powerful antidepressants or psychotherapy, or both? link to continue reading
Got a mouth like a truck driver? If you’re a woman, it could be costing you some friends. According to a study in the most recent issue of the journal Health Psychology, letting the f-bomb and other expletives fly can make friends who witness your crass language less sympathetic to your plight, no matter how effing painful it might be.
A new study by psychologists at the University of Arizona affirms that profanity helps deal with pain. The bad news, though, is that folks around you can be a little irked at your behavior.
For a stubbed toe, a single expletive probably won’t severely damage any relationships. But for people with more serious issues, such as chronic illnesses or injuries, using foul language can come with a cost.
The study, “Naturalistically Observed Swearing, Emotional Support, and Depressive Symptoms in Women Coping With Illness,” is in the current issue of the journal Health Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association. [continue reading…]
