Cerebellum’s Role In Thought And Emotion

NPR recently featured an amazing and fascinating story about Jonathan Keleher, a 33 year old man who was born with part of his brain missing. Keleher is one of a handful of people known to have lived their entire lives without a cerebellum, a structure that usually contains about half the brain’s neurons. As a result…

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Kids Know It’s Sometimes Nicer to Lie

Children can be brutally honest, but at what age do they start to realize what they say can hurt other people’s feelings? Felix Warneken and Emily Orlins, two researchers at Harvard, recently set out to investigate that question, and they published their results in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. In their experiment they gathered…

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Genuine Sadness vs Posed Grief

Take a look at the videos below. Both show mothers making emotional pleas to bring their missing children home. Can you tell which is expressing genuine sadness and which is posing their grief? What do you see on one mother’s face that you do not see on the other? For a past blog post on…

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Body Language of Defeat

A recent article in Slate by Daniel Engber looked at the body language of college-basketball athletes, particularly in moments of victory and defeat. Engber noticed certain consistent gestures: such as arms outstretched in victory and hands on heads in defeat. But what are the reasons for these gestures and are they learned or innate? He…

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