Studies and Analyses

The phrase, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” has its roots in a passage of the Bible (Matthew 6:3). If there is truth to this old saying, the reasons may have as much to do with the way the brain obtains information from the arms as it does from the observations of ancient scribes.

Background

Most individuals are either left- or right-handed. How the skills they have learned from the dominant arm (or hand) are transferred to the non-dominant arm ha

A low-testosterone man newly married to a high-testosterone woman might seem destined to be henpecked but a Penn State study found that such a coupling actually produced a marriage where the wife provided better social support for her mate.

Dr. Catherine Cohan, assistant professor of human development and family studies, says, “It’s not necessarily the case that higher testosterone is all bad. Testosterone is related to assertiveness which can be good or bad depending on whether it is m

Dartmouth research group has found a new and unexpected way our attention can be grabbed – by grabbable objects. Their study, which appears in the March 17 advance online issue of Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates that objects we typically associate with grasping, such as screwdrivers, forks or pens, automatically attract our visual attention, especially if these items are on a person’s right-hand side.

In the brain, there are two primary visual pathways, one for identifying objects (p

A long-term study of patients in Rochester, Minn., with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa found that their survival rates did not differ from the expected survival rates of others of the same age and sex.

The results, published in the March issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, add to the knowledge of anorexia nervosa and point to other areas that need greater study from researchers.

“Although our data suggest that overall mortality is not increased among community patients

It is natural to suppose that conducting the same tests, with the same strain of mice and the same protocols on identical equipment but in different labs will ensure similar results. A University of Alberta researcher and his team have found that assumption not to be true–fuelling the nature vs. nurture debate and shedding some light on the importance of environmental factors in experiments.

Dr. Douglas Wahlsten, from the Department of Psychology, is part of a research team that use mice w

Odour is an affective stimulus that elicits both positive as well as negative emotional responses. This has implications for the way consumers evaluate products. Odour as a marketing tool has received an increased amount of attention recently. Retailers are exploring the impact of scents on consumers’ purchase behaviour (think for example about the smell of fresh pastries when you enter a supermarket). Nowadays, technological developments enable the use of scent-patches on packaging and ads, which ma