Thirsty Mice And Virtual Reality: The Week ’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web For the first time, researchers have looked at what happens in the brain when people take the psychedelic drug salvinorin A, from the plant salvia divinorum. The team found that the drug disrupts the default mode network, a set of areas that are normally synchronised when we’re not engaged in any particular task, similar to the effects found for the “classical” psychedelic drugs like psilocybin. But the subjective effects of salvinorin A are quite different to the effects of those other drugs, leaving some researchers questioning how important the default mode network really is to the psychedelic experience. Daniel Oberhaus, who participated in the trial, has the story at Wired. A study in the 1980s claimed that married couples begin to look more alike over time — but now a larger replication has failed to find any evidence that that is true. Instead the new study suggests that people tend to partner up with those who already look similar to them, reports Ian Sample at The Guardian. It’s been more than a decade since the replication crisis became a well-known issue in psychology, and in science more generally. So has anything changed? Not a lot, writes Kelsey Piper at Vox, although there have been some small victories along the way. How people behave in virtual reality scenarios can provide insight into their personality, writes researcher Stephen Fairclough at Th...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs