Does your dog have social skills?

A study suggests that viewing the owner’s face works as a positive social reinforcement for dogs. Learn more about this and other surprising results about “man’s best friend”.

Gratitude as stress-buffering

According to Brenda O’Connell, principal investigator in the research project 287/18 - More thankful, less stressed? Gratitude and physiological reactions to stress, supported by the BIAL Foundation, state gratitude has a unique stress-buffering effect on both reactions to and recovery from acute psychological stress. These findings are reported in the paper Gratitude, affect balance, and stress buffering: A multilevel examination of cardiovascular responses to a laboratory stress task published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

Can the brain retrieve unseen motor information during speech vocalization?

Alice Tomassini, supported by the BIAL Foundation in the scope of project 246/20 - The hidden rhythm of interpersonal (sub-)movement coordination, concluded that during speech listening the brain reconstructs articulatory information that is not available to vision. These findings are discussed in the paper Speech listening entails neural encoding of invisible articulatory features published in the journal NeuroImage.

Does mood impact our confidence?

“Spontaneous fluctuations of mood and confidence in decision making are independent in the healthy adult population” was one of the main highlights of the study “Mood and implicit confidence independently fluctuate at different time scales” published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, and carried out in the scope of the research project 117/18 – The neuronal basis of biases, led by Rubén Moreno Bote and supported by the BIAL Foundation.