Fake Laughter

Like many aspects of human behavior, laughter is complicated. In a recent article for Time, Dr. Greg Bryant, an associate professor at UCLA outlines a study he conducted at his Vocal Communication Lab. There, he and his research team played recorded laughs to participants and asked them to distinguish whether the laugh was “real” or…

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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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Autism Awareness Day: Past Blog

April 2, is Autism Awareness Day. Every year, autism organizations around the world celebrate the day with unique fundraising and awareness-raising events. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often struggle to recognize emotions from facial expressions (facial affect), hindering their social interactions. By using Humintell’s emotion recognition training tool MiX, researchers out of Rush University Medical…

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