All Articles by Meghan Meyer, PhD student
Ms. Meyer is a PhD student at the University of California-Los Angeles, where she studies social cognitive neuroscience with her adviser, Professor Matthew Lieberman. Prior to joining UCLA, she worked on behavioral and brain imaging studies in the Stanford University Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Lab and the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of Chicago, and completed her M.A. in cognitive science, with a specialty in cognitive neuroscience, from Ecole Normale Superieur, in Paris France. When she is not in the lab designing studies and analyzing data, she enjoys writing about scientific findings and their broader impact for general audiences.
The Neural Basis of the Self
Perhaps the most personal and most quintessentially human aspect of our existence is the experience of our ‘self.’ What contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett has described as the unitary narration of our experience, the ‘author’ of our life. Artists, writers, philosophers and psychologists dedicate much of their attention to describing and discerning the kernels of the self. And now, cognitive neuroscientists have entered the debate. With the recent advent of brain imaging technologies, researchers now have a tool to take a stab at this fundamental, though esoteric, question.
Laughter’s the Best Remedy
Groucho Marx once said, "A clown is like an aspirin, only he works twice as fast." Indeed, research suggests that humor can minimize our perceptions of physical pain. Various theoretical explanations have been offered to explain the analgesic effects of humor, and humor’s potential role in pain therapy appears promising.Studies exploring the role of humor in pain perception involve showing participants funny videos prior to the “cold presser task,” in which participants submerge their hand into very cold water for as long as possible.
Social and Physical Pain Share Neural Architecture
The old adage, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” may be more defensive than accurate. Indeed, most languages rely on words that represent pain -- hurt feelings, heartache, broken hearts -- to communicate feelings of social distress. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that sayings such as these may reflect more than poetic metaphor, and instead indicate an overlap in neural systems used to represent physical and social pain in humans.
The Psychology of Minority Students
A major public policy concern is the well known fact that many minority students under-achieve scholastically. The roots of the discrepancy in performance of some minorities and their white counterparts has been attributed to many causes, such as socioeconomic disparities and poor school systems in minority communities. Many of the explanations, however, focus on the students’ environment, and less attention is paid to the psychology of being a minority student in America. Recent provocative research in social psychology, however, suggests that a large portion of academic performance differences may reflect minority students’ representations of stereotypes surrounding their racial and ethnic identities.
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