Psychology

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Azrael
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Re: Psychology

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cultivate a white rose
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Doc
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Re: Psychology

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Why people see faces where there aren't any.


http://www.livescience.com/47767-how-lo ... alley.html
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Uncanny Valley Not So Uncanny for Lonely People
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | September 10, 2014 08:57am ET

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black and white portrait of sad young girl
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Loneliness breeds wishful thinking, according to a new study that finds that eerily unrealistic faces seem more realistic to people when they feel isolated and alone.

People who are lonely see the "uncanny valley effect" — when a face looks almost, but not quite, lifelike — as more appealing than social butterflies do, according to the new research, detailed Sept. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

"Even though two people may be looking at the same face, the point at which they see life and decide that person is worthy of meaningful social interaction may not be the same," Katherine Powers, a psychologist at Dartmouth College and one of the researchers on the study, said in a statement. [5 Ways Your Emotions Influence Your World (and Vice Versa)]

Freaky faces

People crave social connection, Powers said. In fact, social ties are so important that lonely people actually have worse health than those who have strong social connections. Humans also tune in to faces over other stimuli, which is part of the reason they also mistake rock formations on Mars for faces. Given that previous research has found that lonely people often fill their social emptiness by attributing humanlike traits to their gadgets or pets, Powers and her colleagues wondered if loneliness could affect the most basic social action: deciding whether someone is alive and human.

The researchers created a series of "morphs," mixing the face of a doll with the face of a real person. The images ranged from 100 percent doll to 100 percent human, with various mixtures of the two in between. First, 30 undergraduate participants viewed the faces one by one and rated them as "animate" or "inanimate." Next, the participants filled out a survey about their need to belong, which asked how strongly they agreed with statements like, "I want other people to accept me."
Facial morphs, from 0 percent human to 100 percent human, used to determine the point at which people declare a face to be animate versus inanimate.
[Pin It] Facial morphs, from 0 percent human to 100 percent human, used to determine the point at which people declare a face to be animate versus inanimate.
Credit: Katherine Powers, Andrea Worsham, Jonathan Freeman, Thalia Wheatley and Todd Heatherton, Psychological Science
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On average, people required the morphs to be 68.9 percent human before they'd dub them "animate." But people with a stronger need for social connections, as indicated by their responses on the survey, rated doll-like faces as animate more often than people with a less need, the researchers reported. The need for social connection explained 14 percent of the variation in people's thresholds for rating a face as alive.

Next, the researchers asked 49 different undergraduates to complete the same face-rating task. This time, instead of measuring the students' pre-existing need for social connections, the researchers manipulated that need. Half of the students were told that their futures would be isolated and lonely. The other half were told to expect lives full of stable, fulfilling relationships.

The students who were triggered to feel lonely and in need of connection rated more-inanimate faces as "animate" compared with the students triggered to feel socially connected. Induced loneliness lowered the threshold for declaring a face "alive" by 7 percent, Powers and her colleagues found.

Desperate for connection

Because social networks are so important to humans, lonely people may cast a wider net in the search for connections, the researchers concluded.

"I think the fact that we can observe such a bias in the perception of basic social cues really underscores the fundamental nature of the human need for social connection," Powers said. If someone is desperate to make those connections, they might benefit from lower standards for the people with whom they're trying to connect.

"Though refinement of these judgments may follow," the researchers wrote, "the initial perceptual bias we have demonstrated suggests that overattributing animacy may be a fundamentally adaptive strategy."
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Heracleum Persicum
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Re: Psychology

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.


Thousands of customers across the country are booking appointments with professional cuddlers in at least 16 states.

“I am a convert,” says Melissa Duclos-Yourdon, 35, a freelance writer and editor in Vancouver, Wash. She originally hired a cuddler after hearing about it from members of her book club, thinking it could provide fodder for an essay. Once cuddled, “I felt transformed,” she says.

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YMix
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Re: Psychology

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Psychopathic violent offenders' brains can't understand punishment

MRI-scans reveal abnormalities in many areas of the brain
University of Montreal

Psychopathic violent offenders have abnormalities in the parts of the brain related to learning from punishment, according to an MRI study led by Sheilagh Hodgins and Nigel Blackwood. "One in five violent offenders is a psychopath. They have higher rates of recidivism and don't benefit from rehabilitation programmes. Our research reveals why this is and can hopefully improve childhood interventions to prevent violence and behavioural therapies to reduce recidivism," explained Professor Hodgins of the University of Montreal and Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal. "Psychopathic offenders are different from regular criminals in many ways. Regular criminals are hyper-responsive to threat, quick-tempered and aggressive, while psychopaths have a very low response to threats, are cold, and their aggressively is premeditated," added Dr. Nigel Blackwood, who is affiliated with King's College London. "Evidence is now accumulating to show that both types of offenders present abnormal, but distinctive, brain development from a young age."

In order to develop programs that prevent offending and rehabilitation programs that reduce re-offending, it is essential to identify the neural mechanisms underlying psychopath's persistent violent behaviour. "We have been using Magnetic Resonance Imaging to study brain structure and function in a sample of violent offenders in England, one group with psychopathy and one without, and a sample of healthy non-offenders. We have found structural abnormalities in both gray matter and specific white matter fiber tracts among the violent offenders with psychopathy," Hodgins explained. Grey matter is mostly involved with processing information and cognition, while white matter coordinates the flow of information between different parts of the brain.

12 violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, 20 violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder but not psychopathy, and 18 healthy non-offenders participated in the study. The offenders had been convicted of murder, rape, attempted murder and grevious bodily harm, and were recruited from Britain's probation service. "We observed reductions in gray matter volumes bilaterally in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles relative to the other offenders and to the non-offenders," Hodgins said. These brain regions are involved in empathy, the processing of pro-social emotions such as guilt and embarrassment, and moral reasoning. "Abnormalities were also found in white matter fiber tracts in the dorsal cingulum, linking the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex that were specifically associated with the lack of empathy that is typical of psychopathy," Blackwood added. These same regions are involved in learning from rewards and punishment.

In order to engage in appropriate behaviour, it is essential to learn from punishment, both real and imagined. "Most individuals do not walk in front of buses as they can imagine the horrible consequences if the bus hits them. Offenders do not walk in front of buses either, suggesting that they also learn from punishment, nor do they show less sensitivity to punishment than others," Hodgins said. "In childhood, both psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders alike are repeatedly punished by parents and teachers for breaking rules and for assaulting others, and from adolescence onwards, they are frequently incarcerated. Yet they persist in engaging in violent behaviour towards others. Thus, punishment does not appear to modify their behaviour."

While inside the brain scanner, the violent offenders and non-offenders completed a task that assessed their ability to adjust their behaviour when the consequences of their responses changed from positive to negative. The task was an image matching game - sometimes points were awarded for correctly pairing images, sometimes they weren't. "When these violent offenders completed neuropsychological tasks, they failed to learn from punishment cues, to change their behaviour in the face of changing contingencies, and made poorer quality decisions despite longer periods of deliberation," Blackwood explained.

The researchers also examined activity across the brain during the completion of the task. "We found that the violent offenders with psychopathy, as compared to both the violent offenders without psychopathy and the non-offenders, displayed abnormal responding to punishment within the posterior cingulate and insula when a previously rewarded response was punished. Our previous research had shown abnormalities in the white matter tract connecting these two regions. In contrast, the violent offenders without psychopathy showed brain functioning similar to that of the non-offenders," Blackwood explained. "These results suggest the violent offenders with psychopathy are characterized by a distinctive organization of the brain network that is used to learn from punishment and from rewards."

Deciding on what to do involves generating a list of possible actions, weighing the negative and positive consequences of each, and hopefully choosing the behaviour most likely to lead to a positive outcome. "Offenders with psychopathy may only consider the possible positive consequences and fail to take account of the likely negative consequences. Consequently, their behavior often leads to punishment rather than reward as they had expected," Hodgins said. "Punishment signals the necessity to change behaviour. Clearly, in certain situations, offenders have difficulty learning from punishment to change their behaviour."

Conduct problems and the antecedents of psychopathy emerge early in life when learning-based interventions have the potential to alter brain structure and functioning. "Programs that teach parents optimal parenting skills lead to significant reductions in conduct problems among their children, except among those who are callous and insensitive to others. As our studies and those of others show, the abnormalities of brain structure and function associated with persistent violent behavior are subtle and complex," Blackwood explained. "The results of our studies are providing insights into the neural mechanisms characterizing adult violent offenders that may be used, along with other findings, in designing programs to reduce recidivism. Our results also provide hypotheses about the abnormal development of violent offenders to be tested in studies of children."

This information is critical to the development of programs to prevent violent criminality. "Since most violent crimes are committed by men who display conduct problems from a young age, learning-based interventions that target the specific brain mechanisms underlying this behaviour pattern and thereby change the behaviour would significantly reduce violent crime," Hodgins said.
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
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Doc
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Re: Psychology

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YMix wrote:
Psychopathic violent offenders' brains can't understand punishment

MRI-scans reveal abnormalities in many areas of the brain
University of Montreal


This information is critical to the development of programs to prevent violent criminality. "Since most violent crimes are committed by men who display conduct problems from a young age, learning-based interventions that target the specific brain mechanisms underlying this behaviour pattern and thereby change the behaviour would significantly reduce violent crime," Hodgins said.
Hmmm Just another medical excuse to experiment on children.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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