Culture, Brain, and Development Student Group Spring 2011

= Meetings =

February 9 - Stress &amp; Resilliance in a Social Context. Reading: "A Biology of Misfortune: Stress Reactivity, Social Context, and the Ontogency of Pyschopathology in Early Life" by W. Thimas Bryce.

February 16 - The cultural dependency of human cognition. Reading: "Culture-senstive neural substrates of human cognition: a transcultural neuroimaging approach" by Han, S., and Northoff, G. (2008).

February 23 - Of Love &amp; Computers. Reading: The classic short story “True Love” by Isaac Asimov.

March 2 - Moral Psychology: Dissolving contradictions and moving past simple harm &amp; fairness paradigms. Reading: Haidt, J., (2007) The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology. Science 18(316). 998-1002.

March 9 - Philosophy of Humor: What makes something funny? Reading: "On Jokes," an  essay  by  Noël  Carroll .

March 16 - No meeting, Spring Break.

March 23 - Grant Application Workshop. Come talk to Laura Sizer, Cynthia Gill, and Jane Couperus of the CBD Steering Committee about getting funded!

March 30 - Psychopathy: Morality, Reasoning, &amp; Social Context with Kathi Pappas. Reading: Ermer,  E., and  Kiehl, K.A. (2010).  "Psychopaths  are  impaired  in  social  exchange  and  precautionary  reasoning." Journal of Psychological Psychological Science (online).

April 6 - Brain on training: Lessons from interdisciplinary research with CBD Graduate Fellow and UMass Ph.D candidate Amarylis Velez (B.A. Psychology, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez). No reading for this week.

April 13 - The Cultural Neuroscience of Consciousness. Reading: “Cultural Neuroscience of Consciousness: From visual perception to self-awareness” by Chiao, J., Li, Z., Harada, T. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15(10), 2008.

April 20 - The Development of Auditory and Visual Attention in Children with CBD Graduate Fellow and UMass Ph.D candidate Patrick Taylor (B.S. Cellular and Molecular Biology, Texas Tech University). Optional background reading: Neural mechanisms of intermodal sustained selective attention with concurrently presented auditory and visual stimuli" by Saupe, K., Schröger, E., Andersen, S.K., and Müller, M.M. (2009).

April 27 - The Intractibility and the use of Heuristics in Psychology. What does computational complexity have to do with the mind and brain? Come find out! Copies of the reading are available in the ASH Lobby and at the library circulation desk.

'''May 4 - Should happiness be classified as a mental disorder? The problem with using statistical norms to define “healthy". '''Reading: “A proposal to classify happiness a a psychiatric disorder” by Richard P. Bentall,Journal of Medical Ethics (1992).

May 11 - Screening: A Scanner Darkly.