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What are the"Hard Problems" in the social sciences?
Playing on our instincts
Researchers have long known that lab animals’ behavior can be manipulated by artificially stimulating their natural instincts. Over-stimulating animals can provoke such extreme responses that they end up preferring artificial objects to the natural ones for which the instincts were designed. Humans living in modern society are something like those lab animals, a Harvard psychology professor says. Like them, our innate instincts are overstimulated by unnatural products, as well as by advertising and images. And, like them, we respond almost unconsciously: reaching for more food, Web-surfing for porn, dumping time and money on “cute” toys, sitting for hours in front of televisions, and sending troops to fight a dehumanized “them.”
Face it:
Gay men are most attracted to the most masculine-faced men, while straight men prefer the most feminine-faced women, according to the results of a new study by a Harvard researcher.The findings suggest that regardless of sexual orientation, men’s brains are wired for attraction to sexually dimorphic faces — those with facial features that are most synonymous with gender.
To tell the truth
The rationale behind systemic torture is that pain will make the guilty confess, but a new study by Harvard researchers finds that the pain of torture can make even the innocent appear guilty. In the study, participants met a woman suspected of cheating to win money. The woman was then “tortured” by having her hand immersed in ice water while study participants listened to the session over an intercom. She never confessed to anything, but the more she suffered, the guiltier she was perceived to be.
Building human cooperation: Carrots work better
Rewards go further than punishment in building human cooperation and benefiting the common good, according to research published today in the journal Science by Harvard and collaborators at the Stockholm School of Economics. While previous studies have focused almost exclusively on punishment for promoting public cooperation, rewards are shown to be much more successful in this research.
Neuroimaging suggests truthfulness requires no act of will for honest people
A new study of the cognitive processes involved with honesty suggests that truthfulness depends more on absence of temptation than active resistance to temptation.Using neuroimaging, psychologists looked at the brain activity of people given the chance to gain money dishonestly by lying and found that honest people showed no additional neural activity when telling the truth, implying that extra cognitive processes were not necessary to choose honesty. However, those individuals who behaved dishonestly, even when telling the truth, showed additional activity in brain regions that involve control and attention.
Childhood adversity may affect processing in the brain’s reward pathways
New research shows that childhood adversity is associated with diminished neural activity in certain regions of the brain.Harvard researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity as participants played a game involving cues that predicted monetary re-wards and penalties.
Harvard Medical School fetes scholar, names chair
Harvard Medical School (HMS) will endow a new chair named for child psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, the School’s longtime Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine, starting July 1.Emeritus since 1993, Eisenberg has taught and mentored generations of physicians at Harvard (since 1967) and elsewhere (since 1947).At 86, Eisenberg is still an active medical scholar and writer. Most recently, he has pressed for a rigorous ethical code to avoid conflicts of interest in medical practice – and for screenings for depression in the primary care setting.
Study: Women more likely than men to reject unattractive babies
Women are more likely than men to reject unattractive-looking babies, according to a study by researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, possibly reflecting an evolutionary-derived need for diverting limited resources towards the nurturing of healthy offspring. The findings also challenge the idea of unconditional maternal love.
Invention of cooking drove evolution of the human species, new book argues
“You are what you eat.” Can these pithy words explain the evolution of the human species?Yes, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, who argues in a new book that the invention of cooking — even more than agriculture, the eating of meat, or the advent of tools — is what led to the rise of humanity.
New department reflects the evolution of human evolution
Earlier this month, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) made official what scientists worldwide have known for years: Harvard is a hotbed of research and teaching in the field of human evolutionary biology — the study of why we’re the way we are.
Fijian girls succumb to Western dysmorphia
In 1982, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Anne E. Becker was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe when she traveled to Fiji for a summer of anthropology fieldwork.
A mother’s criticism touches nerve in formerly depressed
Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never-depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies.
Do you know what makes you happy?
Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person's experience is often more informative than your own best guess.The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.
"My genome, my self"
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. I have been tested for vocational interest (closest match: psychologist), intelligence (above average), personality (open, conscientious, agreeable, average in extraversion, not too neurotic) and political orientation (neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian).

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