Psychology

A new study by scientists at University of British Columbia and Université Paris Descartes found that babies growing up in bilingual environments are more than well equipped to tackle the challenge of distinguishing between the two from a very early age – as young as seven months old according to the findings. Scientists, linguistics and [...]

Highschool students whose friends have higher grades than them have a significant tendency to raise their own grades over the course of a year, a study conducted by Hiroki Sayama from Binghamton University and his collaborators from Maine-Endwell High School in Endwell, New York, including 4 high school students. Previous research had already shown that [...]

The long debated idea of women and men being ‘just friends’ has been given a serious blow, as a new study suggests that men’s relationships with their female friends may be fuelled by an undercurrent of sexual attraction regardless of whether they are single or not; the feeling, however, is not mutual. University of Wisconsin [...]

A new study has shown that children develop an interest in animals very early – toddlers toddlers prefer to look at an animal (even a snake or spider) than play with a pile of attractive toys. The paper was published by a team led by Vanessa LoBue from Rutgers University, and it investigates young children’s [...]

The Eurasian Jays are among the most intelligent birds studied thus far by biologists, belong to the corvids, a group of birds that also includes crows. The latter are especially gifted, as they’ve been observed making use of tools, associate faces with behavior and even recognize when a fellow crow has died. Quite crafty fellows. [...]

  Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, has published a comment piece in the journal Nature, where he makes a rather shocking and disturbing claim: mankind will never produce a genius like Newton, Einstein or Darwin. He claims that this will happen because we’ve already discovered all the most basic [...]

They say that the bully is actually the victim – and studies on adolescent rats seem to support this idea; younger rats subjected to a stressful environment turn out to be aggressive adults, behaviors that may be explained by accompanying epigenetic changes and altered brain activity. Whoa, let’s slow down a little. Much like humans, [...]

There are some 30 million facebook updates pushed on the massive social network every hour, so it might seem like common  sense for most of us to dismiss these as trivial. Scientists at University of Warwick and UC San Diego however chose not to ignore these fleeting, yet direct text updates and actually found some interesting [...]

Chimpanzees have the same sense of fair-play as humans do, explain researchers who played the Ultimatum game with them – it’s the first time such a trait was observed in a non-human species. Playing a fair game The Ultimatum game is a simple game often used in economy game theory in which the two players [...]

People with brown eyes appear more trustworthy than those with blue eyes, unless the man has a broad face. What – is this for real? According to a study conducted by Karel Kleisner and colleagues from Charles University in the Czech Republic – the answer is ‘Yes’. The point of the study was to determine [...]