Editor's Selections: Social Hierarchies, ADHD and Athletics, and Pain in Fish

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.

Social hierarchies are pretty complicated to navigate...so why have them at all? Read about The Status Paradox at Psych Your Mind.ADHD well known, but how might an ADHD diagnosis interact with being an athlete? What should practitioners of sports medicine know about it? Bill Yates discusses this at his Brain Posts blog: ADHD and the Athlete.Do fish feel pain? It's not a trivial question, especially if you are aware of what is on the dinner table. At the Fish Addict blog, grad student David discusses a new report on pain and nociception in fish.

That's it for this week... Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

View the original article here

Editor's Selections: Methodology, Autistic Pigs, Invasive Brains, and OCD

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.

"Most neuroscientists would subscribe to the sensorimotor hypothesis, according to which brains mainly evaluate sensory input to compute motor output," writes Bjorn Brembs. But is it possible that the sensorimotor hypothesis is just the result of some laboratory artifacts? "What happens to a pig if it has a gene for autism?" This is the question that Neuroskeptic addressed earlier this week. Do Pigs Get Autism?What is it that makes an invasive species so successful at invading a new ecosystem? At NeuroDojo, Zen Faulkes asks if the brain could be involved. "Normally, we think of invaders as being able to turn out lots of babies, or having defenses that natives don't, or all sorts of other factors. But could invaders be winning because they are smarter?"How are OCD behaviors formed? Historically, it was thought that there was no physiological basis for this mental illness, but this week at B Good Science, Ben Good discussed some new research that sheds some light on the biological etiology for OCD.

That's it for this week... Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

View the original article here

Editor's Selections: Computer as Therapist, Nicotine and Body-Mass, and Another DSM-5 Proposal - Gambling Addiction

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.

To start us off this week, Neuroskeptic discusses a new study that attempted to use a computer to translate therapists' notes into psychiatric diagnoses. Could it be that certain language used by therapists or their clients could predict the severity or duration of a mental illness? The study has problems, but it's an interesting idea to consider, more generally. Machine-Readable Psychiatry. It is well known, according to Daniel Ocampo Daza of the Ego Sum Daniel blog, that "smokers tend to have a lower body-mass than non-smokers, and that smokers who quit have a tendency to gain weight." Until recently, the mechanism behind the relationship of body-mass and nicotine addiction was unknown, but some new studies shed some light. Nicotine, Appetite, and the Brain.Here's the next in our continuing coverage of new proposals for DSM-5. Dirk Hanson at Addiction Inbox discusses the proposal for the inclusion of a "problem gambling" diagnosis.

That's it for this week... Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

View the original article here

Editor's Selections: Video Games, Reality TV, and Fantasizing

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.

You're running down a corridor in a castle that's under attack by terrorists. Or are their neuroscientists, trying to figure out just how it is that people get involved in the narrative "flow" of a video game? Neuroskeptic explains how your brain gets in on the game.Reality TV might be good for more than just entertainment. Is it possible that reality TV could actually engender romance among the participants, even on shows (like American Idol) that aren't about romance itself (like The Bachelor)? At the new PsySociety blog, Melanie calls on social psychology to explain this phenomenon. Is Reality TV a soulmate machine?Another new psychology blog has a post about TV as well, this week. Over at Psych Your Mind, Amie asks if the extent to which we daydream about our favorite TV, book, or movie characters can be captured by a psychological measure, and if so, what that means. Are you a fantasizer?

That's it for this week... Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

View the original article here