Social neuroscience

The seminar was entitled “Towards a Culturally Informed Social Neuroscience: How Computer Science can Help Untangle Relationships Between Culture, Brain and Health” and was given by Dr. Elizabeth Losin. Dr Losin, is a faculty member in the psychology department and the director of the social and cultural neuroscience lab at UM. The purpose of the seminar was to illustrate the importance of computational methods in the sociocultural neuroscience field. As Dr. Losin explains, advanced computational methods have been applied several times in her workplace while conducting research, and she has realized that “computation is key to answer questions in her research”. Currently Dr. Losin is doing research on how cultural experience shapes the…

words, micro expressions only exist in a blink of an eye that human couldn’t capture. Furthermore, human ways of interaction are deeply connected to emotions and function through a system of “social signals: facial expressions” (Jack, Caldara, and Schyns 19). Thus, it is quite reasonable to begin to infer that emotions is closely related to micro expressions, and there is a positive correlation between these two variables to make them connected. This means that when the consistency of emotions…

Truant Mail The first I ever heard about the University of Alabama’s Neuroscience program was from a letter a woman I barely knew claimed was mine. This letter (Sent after a 2012 Big 10 Expo) had fallen into the wrong hands, thanks to the mailman and had travelled great distances from mailbox F to mailbox G. Serendipity I thought, after warily accepting my truant mail (lest it was another bill), as said letter offered a unique program tailored to fit my interests before my search for graduate…

Carter’s experience includes a master’s degree in neuroscience from at Taiwan University. After completing her master’s, she worked as a research assistant for three years. In 2005, she gained admittance to Case Western Reserve University’s doctoral program. Dr. Carter’s Ph.D. research investigated the role of apolipoprotein E (ApoE) in proteolytic Aβ degradation. While the association between ApoE and Aβ is well established in AD research, the underlying pathology of this association remained…

I have always felt drawn to the sciences. While I have many different interests including anatomy, physiology, and engineering, when looking at them as a whole, they can all be used to help others and give back to those in need. This aspect is a trait that makes up an important part of my personality and guides many of my ambitions in life. This is why social neuroscience is a topic that has shaped my interests. Social neuroscience involves the ways in which human beings interact with one…

worries and stress can take over their brain in a way because it is able to decrease how well a person can think or focus. It is clear that poverty can impact a person’s cognitive capacity negatively. Along with poverty also comes malnutrition. If you are able to help a child relieve their malnutrition it is possible to lessen the effect of poverty in that child’s physical and cognitive development. (Myers & Dewall, 2015) Additionally, there isn’t one way to increase or boost a child’s…

The memory works in a process of three stages- encoding, storage and retrieval. This enables humans to learn new material, store the material and then retrieve and extract it at a later date when necessary (Eysenck & Keane, 2010). However, many psychologists have researched the effect of emotion on these stages of memory processing. Many have been interested in the idea of emotion affecting the ability to accurately retrieve past events due to many alternating factors. Some argue that matching…

nervous system activity (Nahas, 2008). As seen, orthodox medicine is more based in drug treatment while complementary therapies try to heal individuals through less intrusive practices, without using chemicals and with almost no side-effects. 2.2 evaluate attitudes towards complementary therapies Complementary therapies more used by people in the UK are osteopathy, homoeopathy, acupuncture and herbal therapy. Almost half of them choose a complementary treatment hoping it heals their conditions,…

began during an independent research project in the second year of my master’s degree at Bangalore University. I was in awe when I realized how extraordinarily complex the neural mechanisms that support memory formation are and yet these profound neural events may be “undone” if the memories are not retrieved. Furthermore, I learned that memories can be embedded in chains, or “engrams”, composed of antecedent and subsequent events and may lack specific retrieval ‘checkpoints’. Despite having…

Building New Pathways In The Brain It was once commonly accepted that a person’s brain ceased to change after reaching adulthood. Science believed that each part of the brain had its own specific function, and if a certain part was completely damaged, nothing could be done about it. This led to a belief that treatment for many brain conditions was impractical and unjustified, or that even changing our character was unfeasible. But new discoveries in neuroscience have shown that the brain is…