At the end of life, many patients cannot make treatment decisions for themselves and require a surrogate to interact with physicians and make medical decisions on their behalf. A surrogate is a stand-in person, a proxy. While some studies have evaluated how surrogates make or help make treatment decisions, none have looked at the psychological effect of decision-making on surrogates…

When your brain encounters sensory stimuli, such as the scent of your morning coffee or the sound of a honking car, that input gets shuttled to the appropriate brain region for analysis. The coffee aroma goes to the olfactory cortex, while sounds are processed in the auditory cortex. That division of labor suggests that the brain’s structure follows a predetermined, genetic blueprint. However, evidence is mounting that brain regions can take over functions they were not genetically destined to perform.

What should you do when you really, really have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a new study.

Results from a new study contribute to growing evidence that if one of your parents has Alzheimer’s disease, the chances of inheriting it from your mother are higher than from your father.

There are many notions about what happens when someone has won a big prize. We often hear about winners who have spent all their money, incurred debts and become lonely and unhappy. But these are exceptional cases, new research shows. In the vast majority of cases the winners claim to carry on living their normal lives with prudent consumption.

Death can be terrifying. Recognizing that death is inescapable and unpredictable makes us incredibly vulnerable, and can invoke feelings of anxiety, hatred and fear. But new research shows that being a mindful person not only makes you generally more tolerant and less defensive, but it can also actually neutralize fears of dying and death.

Researchers have isolated neural activity that reflects basic mechanisms used by the brain to combine elementary pieces of language in order to construct complex ideas.

A new study indicates an ancient form of complementary medicine may be effective in helping to treat people with mild traumatic brain injury, a finding that may have implications for some US war veterans returning home.

The present article examines the effect of mortality salience on the subjective temporal distance of past experiences with close friends. Since mortality salience motivates relational strivings, it should also affect the perception of past interpersonal experiences that influence the anticipation of future closeness and continuity of the friendship. Three studies were conducted with a total of 428 Japanese college students. Study 1 revealed that a smaller temporal distance of an experience of positive conduct from a friend was associated with greater satisfaction with the friendship. Study 2 found that the temporal distance of such an experience was perceived as smaller in the mortality salience than in the control condition. Study 3 found equivalent results with respect to the temporal distance of the participants’ positive conduct toward a close friend. These results suggest that people cope with existential concerns through reconstructing autobiographical memories in the interpersonal domain.

This research examined whether self-verification acts as a general mediational process of self-fulfilling prophecies. The authors tested this hypothesis by examining whether self-verification processes mediated self-fulfilling prophecy effects within a different context and with a different belief and a different outcome than has been used in prior research. Results of longitudinal data obtained from mothers and their adolescents (N = 332) indicated that mothers’ beliefs about their adolescents’ educational outcomes had a significant indirect effect on adolescents’ academic attainment through adolescents’ educational aspirations. This effect, observed over a 6-year span, provided evidence that mothers’ self-fulfilling effects occurred, in part, because mothers’ false beliefs influenced their adolescents’ own educational aspirations, which adolescents then self-verified through their educational attainment. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.