Feast

Our round-up of the latest and best psych and neuro links:

This Saturday it's a family fun day - Meet Your Brain - at the Royal Institution in London.

A masterful, moving long-form essay and love story about the use of virtual reality to treat burns victims.

Fascinating blog post from Jason Goldman on how women eat at the same pace as their eating companion and eat a similar amount.

Asperger's syndrome is supposed to be a diagnosis you have for life. Meet Benjamin Nugent, novelist and lecturer. He does not have Asperger's. However back in the late 90's he was diagnosed with Asperger's and appeared in a video made by his psychologist Mum called "Understanding Asperger's". Now he's written a piece for the New York Times "I had Asperger's" calling for the diagnostic criteria for Autistic Spectrum Disorders to be narrowed.

The Association of Psychological Science are launching a new journal Clinical Psychological Science - submissions accepted from Spring.

Willpower guru Roy Baumeister can't resist appearing almost everywhere. Read his interview with The Atlantic and take part in a survey he's conducting with New Scientist.

The Guardian are hosting their first ever open weekend in March. Sunday 25th March has a "neuroscience and the law" theme with talks and debates.

Self portraits of a declining brain.

A study that involved decoding words a person had heard from their brain activity provoked a blitz of media coverage. My favourite was Mo Costandi's report for Nature News. On his Guardian blog he also reproduces a report he wrote on a similar study published in 2009, which decoded signals from Broca's area, revealing sub-areas involved in both language production and comprehension.

Group brainstorming has come in for a lot bad press in recent years (e.g. see the New Yorker's recent"Brainstorming doesn't really work" article). On his Work Matters blog Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton comes to brainstorming's defence.

If work psychology is your bag, our sister blog The Occupational Digest has recently published the last of its evidence-based tips for improving your workplace practices - here's a handy menu of all the advice.

Plenty of psychology at the Brighton Science Festival, which kicked off this month.

Salon has an interview with Shimon Edelman, a psychologist and author of the new book: “The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life.”

A new amnesiac movie is coming to UK screens later this month.

Vote for psychology studies that you'd like to see replicated.

New TEDx talk - the sociology and neuroscience of humour.

Free journal issues from BPS Journals: latest issue of British Journal of Clinical Psychology and latest issue of British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology.

Dan Ariely and Malcolm Gladwell chat about writing about psychology research for a mass audience (includes link to podcast).

Read in DEEP VOICE: Why are the voice overs on movie trailers always delivered by men?

Jonathan Haidt on the tribal psychology of politics.

Brian Mossop has reviewed Haidt's new book (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion) for Scientific American Mind.

Joy of Stats BBC documentary is now available online in full.

Alison Gopnik on the teenage brain.

Are we ready for a morality pill? A question prompted by a new study that appeared to show signs of empathy in rats.

January's Neuropod podcast is waiting to be downloaded.

That's all, enjoy your weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.