As anyone who has been subjected to the mocking playground game knows, parroting can be annoying. Yet gentle mimicry can act as a kind of “social glue” in human relationships. It fosters rapport and trust. It signals cohesion. Two people who like each other will often unconsciously mirror each other’s mannerisms in subtle ways – […]
Training teenagers to look at social situations positively could help those with anxiety and may help prevent problems persisting into adult life, new research from Oxford University is beginning to suggest. The researchers found that tasks designed to prompt either positive or negative interpretations of unclear situations can shift how healthy teenagers think about such […]
Young babies’ brains are already specially attuned to the sounds of human voices and emotions, according to a report published online on June 30 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Three- to seven-month-old infants showed more activation in a part of the brain when they heard emotionally neutral human sounds, such as coughing, sneezing, […]
Understanding the actions of other people can be difficult for those with schizophrenia. Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that impairments in a brain area involved in perception of social stimuli may be partly responsible for this difficulty. In findings published in the journal PLoS ONE, the researchers found that a particular brain area, the posterior […]
Obesity is socially contagious, according to research published in the past few years. How it is “caught” from others remains a murky area. But findings from Arizona State University researchers published in the American Journal of Public Health shed light on the transmission of obesity among friends and family. Shared ideas about acceptable weight or […]
Several years ago, Suparna Rajaram noticed a strange sort of contagion in a couple she was close to. One partner acquired dementia — and the other lost the nourishing pleasures of joint reminiscence. “When the other person cannot validate shared memories,” said Rajaram, “they are both robbed of the past.”
Researchers at Queen’s University have found a strong association between computer and Internet use in adolescents and engagement in multiple-risk behaviors (MRBs), including illicit drug use, drunkenness, and unprotected sex. The results were recently published in the Journal of Preventative Medicine.
A new study on social cognition conducted by Masaki Isoda at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Promotion Corporation (OIST) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, in collaboration with Kyoko Yoshida and Nobuhito Saito at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine and Atsushi Iriki at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, has […]
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