Neurological Disorders - News
Terence Sanger: A childhood love, a love of kids
FINALIST YEAR: 1981 [More]
News Bytes of the Week: Large Hadron Collider gets its own rap song
LHC gets its own rap song [More]
Mind Reviews: Books, Movies & More
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Whyby Amanda Ripley. Crown Publishers/Random House, 2008
[More]Fear Factor: Dopamine May Fuel Dread, Too
A brain chemical linked to pleasure and depression may also trigger fear, according to a new study. Researchers say this may explain why the neurotransmitter dopamine, known to cause addictive behavior, may also play a role in anxiety disorders.
"Showing that dopamine can enhance both approach and avoidance behaviors is an important finding," says Howard Fields, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Approach behavior describes what someone attracted to an object does to obtain it. Fields says the finding reveals a new potential target for treating puzzling neurological disorders such as schizophrenia.
[More]Letters to the Editors
Hardly Black and WhiteIn “The Social Psychology of Success,” by S. Alexander Haslam, Jessica Salvatore, Thomas Kessler and Stephen D. Reicher, it seems the authors’ bar graphs concerning blacks’ perceptions of inferiority are adding to problems inherent in group comparisons. The flat tops of the graphs on page 27 imply that all whites are smarter than all blacks. Each bar should actually be a compressed bell curve, showing that only a small percent of whites have superior intelligence and that many blacks are smarter than many whites.
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