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Scientific American

April 27, 2010

Editor’s Selections: Disorders of Facial Recognition, Social Processing, Aggression, and Eating

Lots of great Psychology and Neuroscience blogging this week! Here’s are my ResearchBlogging Editor’s Selections for this week, covering some complex psychological and neurological disorders.

By Jason G. Goldman

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

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Lots of great Psychology and Neuroscience blogging this week! Here's are my ResearchBlogging Editor's Selections for this week, covering some complex psychological and neurological disorders.

  • "Faces are special," says Kevin Mitchell, who writes at Wiring the Brain. Read about the acquired and developmental forms of a fascinating disorder, prosopagnosia, characterized by impaired facial recognition.

  • Faces also figure into a recent post at BPS Research Digest. For the first time, MRI participants socially engaged with another person (via video feed), in a new study from the labs of Rebecca Saxe and John Gabrieli. Findings from this study may help elucidate the neural bases of autism, which has been associated with impaired social processing.

  • How can clinicians distinguish between Borderline Personality Disorder and Psychopathy, both of which are characterized by aggression? Graduate student William Lu offers some thoughts at The Quantum Lobe Chonricles.

  • "Humans...the ultimate confound." Scicurious of Neurotopia muses on the role of dopamine in eating disorders, and experimental confounds in investigating this complex issue.

Jason G. Goldman is a science journalist based in Los Angeles. He has written about animal behavior, wildlife biology, conservation, and ecology for Scientific American, Los Angeles magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, Conservation magazine, and elsewhere. He contributes to Scientific American's "60-Second Science" podcast, and is co-editor of Science Blogging: The Essential Guide (Yale University Press). He enjoys sharing his wildlife knowledge on television and on the radio, and often speaks to the public about wildlife and science communication.

More by Jason G. Goldman