Posts tagged with 'mind-body'
Embodied cognition: muscle & willpower
22nd February 2011
This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file. Introduction: Lying very comfortably in my warm bed early this morning, I knew I wanted to get up but it was hard to do. I waited a little, then tightened my right hand into a …
Embodied cognition: posture & feelings
21st February 2011
This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file. Sadly (!) more recent research throws doubt on this 'power posture' literature ... see for example Simmons & Simonsohn's paper "Power posing: P-curving the evidence". Intriguingly there is an argument that possible benefits of an …
Antonio Damasio’s “Self comes to mind”: memory and the autobiographical self 1
10th January 2011
"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." Mark Twain I wrote last month about "Antonio Damasio's 'Self comes to mind': overview" saying that I wanted to think a bit more about three of the areas covered in his recent book - "Emotions and …
Antonio Damasio’s “Self comes to mind”: emotions and the body 2
3rd January 2011
I wrote an initial blog post last month on "Antonio Damasio's 'Self comes to mind': overview". I commented that I wanted to think a bit more about three of the areas covered in the book - "Emotions and the body", "Memory and the autobiographical self" and "Mindfulness, protoself, core and …
Antonio Damasio’s “Self comes to mind”: emotions and the body 1
20th December 2010
I wrote last week about "Antonio Damasio's 'Self comes to mind': overview" saying that I wanted to think a bit more about three of the areas covered in the book - "Emotions and the body", "Memory and the autobiographical self" and "Mindfulness, protoself, core and autobiographical self". I mentioned that …
Recent research: two studies on panic, two on attention training for anxiety disorders, and three on the effects of child abuse
19th November 2009
Here are seven recent papers on panic, attention training, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse (all details & abstracts to these studies are listed further down this blog post). Pfaltz & colleagues report on a novel ambulatory respiratory monitoring system that seems to demonstrate that panic sufferers are not …
Recent research: NICE guidance on recognition of child maltreatment & report of the Task Force on neck pain
3rd September 2009
Here are a disparate pair of subjects for a research update. One is the recent NICE guideline on " ... alerting features in children and young people (under 18 years) of: physical, sexual and emotional abuse, neglect, fabricated or induced illness." I have posted on NICE and its guidelines before. …
Recent research: mind-body & body-mind effects for cancer, allergy, dementia, & mental health
18th December 2008
Here are five studies on the loose theme of how the mind affects the body, and the body affects the mind ... and that the distinction between mind and body is pretty arbitrary anyway. Using meta-analysis, Chida & colleagues highlight considerable evidence suggesting that stress-related psychosocial factors have an adverse …
Recent research: six studies on couples - attraction, touch, viewpoint, comparison, empathy & sex
4th December 2008
Here are half a dozen recent studies on men & women. Elliot & Niesta found that red, relative to other colours, lead men to view women as "more attractive and sexually desirable". Holt-Lundstad & colleagues randomized couples to a "support enhancement intervention" involving shared gentle massage for 30 minutes three …
Recent research: four happiness studies on traditional advice, health benefits, and the particular value of safety & contentment
16th October 2008
It seemed time to post on recent research involving happiness and wellbeing. Here are four studies from the current issues of the Journal of Happiness Studies (the September edition is open access with all full articles freely viewable) and the Journal of Positive Psychology. Ad Bergsma discusses advice on how …