Sadomasochism, a Stroop test, and a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Sadomasochism, a Stroop test, and a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex figure prominently, almost exclusively, in the Huffington Post’s report about the highlights of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, along with a Dance of Souls: Called the “Dance of Souls,” this ritual involves people getting temporary skin piercings, through which hooks attached to […]

Ant men who really love their mother

This half-century-old song by Tom Lehrer seems—save for its failure to mention ants—to anticipate a study published this month about ants: “Virgin ant queens mate with their own sons to avoid failure at colony foundation,” Christine Vanessa Schmidt [pictured here], Sabine Frohschammer, Alexandra Schrempf, Jürgen Heinze, Naturwissenschaften, vol. 101, no. 1, January 2014, pp 69-72. […]

Professor Loving’s Research about Loving

Professor Timothy J. Loving of Purdue University specializes in research about loving. His web site explains: Biography Dr. Loving is primarily interested in the relationship support process. Specifically, he investigates the reasons for, and consequences of, romantically involved individuals’ conversations with their social network members about the romantic relationship. One of his fairly recent studies […]

Press Release of the Week: “Reduced cognitive control in passionate lovers”

This week’s Press Release of the Week was released into the wild by Leiden University. Here are its headline and highlights: Reduced cognitive control in passionate lovers People who are in love are less able to focus and to perform tasks that require attention. Researcher Henk van Steenbergen [pictured here] concludes this, together with colleagues […]