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Link Feast

Our pick of this week’s 10 best psychology and neuroscience links.

18 April 2015

By Christian Jarrett

Autistic Traits Aren’t Linked To Brain Anatomy?
Neuroskeptic (a previous Digest guest blogger) looks at a new study that failed to find correlations in healthy people between brain structure and their self-reported autistic-like traits.

Do Anger-Prone Communities Suffer More Heart Disease? A Striking Big Data Finding
David Myers reports on a new study of emotional words used by Twitter users.

The Neuroanatomy Lesson (video)
A neuroscientist goes to extreme lengths to teach us about brain anatomy.

Why It’s Selfish To Avoid Giving Negative Feedback
I looked at the psychology research for 99U.com on how and why we should provide our colleagues with constructive criticism.

Can a Facelift Make You More Likeable?
A study by surgeons claimed that women who’d had cosmetic facial surgery were rated more likeable and attractive. NHS Choices takes a cold look at the evidence.

Oxytocin Makes New Mouse Mothers Focus on Cries of Lost Pups
Ed Yong provides the run down on a fascinating new study that is rare for telling us something about how the hormone oxytocin exerts its effects.

The Reading Brain
How our brains learn to process the written word (from the wonderful Frontiers for Young Minds website).

Smiling Changes How You View the World
At NY Mag’s Science of Us blog, I looked at research showing how smiling changes the way our brain processes other people’s facial expressions.

“Power Poses” Might Not Be So Powerful After All
Arts Technica reports on a new study that failed to replicate the previous finding that power poses raise testosterone and increase risk-taking.

The Surprising Downsides of Being Clever
Bad news for our super-intelligent readers as David Robson (a Digest guest blogger) reports for BBC Future on the disconnect between high IQ and life satisfaction.