The so-called “love hormone” oxytocin, which is linked to a mother’s tender feelings for her child and long-term devotion between mates, may play a more general role in promoting the social cohesion of a group. In a small new study, researchers found that volunteers who got an oxytocin boost were better able to recognize faces they had seen the day before than people who got a placebo, but were no better at recognizing landscapes and and sculptures that they’d previously viewed.
The results are “striking,” says psychologist Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Insel and colleagues have [previously] shown that oxytocin improves the ability of mice to recognize other mice, … but he notes that this is the first time such a specific effect has been seen in humans. The research “supports the notion that social memory is a unique form of memory, biologically distinct from general object memory,” he says [ScienceNOW Daily News].

In a remarkable experiment, researchers found that a man who was rendered completely
Researchers have discovered that it’s simple to trigger the illusion of body swapping: All it takes are some goggles, live-streaming video, and a bit of a belly rub. Spooky as it sounds, neuroscientists … were able to use simple camera trickery to fool volunteers into perceiving the bodies of both mannequins and other people as their own [
Researchers have determined the mechanism by which the world’s simplest
Researchers have used a CT scanner to peer inside the hollow, fossilized skulls of a group of meat-eating
Volunteers who held a warm cup of coffee in their hands were more likely to rate other people as warm, generous, and sociable, a new study has found, in contrast to those subjects who cradled a cup of ice coffee. In a second experiment, people who held a heating pad were more likely to give a small reward to a friend than keep it for themselves, in contrast to those who held an icepack. In other words, researchers concluded, holding something warm makes you feel more generous toward others; holding something cold makes you, well, cold and selfish [
An electronic sniffer can not only determine when plants are under stress, it can also differentiate between those that have been damaged by caterpillars, mites, mildew, or by humans armed with a hole-puncher. In a new study, researcher Nigel Paul showed that an electronic nose can detect the subtle volatile organic compounds given off by plants that are under attack.
People who
In a development that may pave the way for the invention of an “artificial nose,” researchers have found a way to mass-produce the odor receptors found in human nostrils. An artificial nose could have military applications: DARPA has taken an interest in the research, which it believes could lead to the development of tools to replace drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs [
In
In a promising result for
A new psychological study has found that social exclusion made test subjects feel literally cold, and increased their preference for warm beverages and soup. It’s the latest finding from the field of embodied cognition, in which researchers have shown that the language of metaphor can activate physical
In a match-up between an annoyed human brandishing a fly swatter and a buzzing
Scientists have produced the cells that make up delicate inner ear hairs in mouse embryos, a step that could point the way to reversing hearing loss and curing congenital deafness. Sensory hair cells inside the cochlea, the auditory portion of the inner ear, convert sound waves into electrical impulses that are delivered to the brain. The loss of these minute hairs, or the nerves that control them, is the most common cause of hearing impairment and so-called nerve deafness [