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Sustained stress erodes memory, and the immune system plays a key role in the cognitive impairment, according to a new study from researchers at The Ohio State University.
[...] "This is chronic stress. It's not just the stress of giving a talk or meeting someone new," said lead researcher Jonathan Godbout, associate professor of neuroscience at Ohio State.
This is the first study of its kind to establish the relationship between short-term memory and prolonged stress. In the case of the mice, that meant repeat visits from a larger, nasty intruder mouse.
Mice that were repeatedly exposed to the aggressive intruder had a hard time recalling where the escape hole was in a maze they'd mastered prior to the stressful period.
-- submitted from IRC
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You're being followed. Cut out the hanky-panky for a few days.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 10 2017, @09:54PM
I'll be the first to admit that we'd be fucked in terms of scientific advancement without the humble house mouse serving as our proxy for research.
But at the same time, every time a see a psychological study focused on mouse-model behavior make the general news, I have this cringing reaction where a thousand incorrect biases are confirmed about human nature without a second thought by readers. And dozens of new incorrect theories of mind start bubbling up.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @10:11PM
Mice or not, this pretty much sums up psychology as a field of study (and several other fields too).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @10:17PM
Psychiatry kicks it up a notch and just uses any observed behavior as evidence to support a diagnosis that requires medication with whatever drug big pharma is pushing this month.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 10 2017, @10:30PM
I see, you never get to step 6, because at step 4 you always go back to step 1. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 10 2017, @10:34PM
And here we have the post-modernist "modernist". By assuming nefarious intent by an entire field of study that applies to scientific method, they can safely distance themselves from any sort of structured, objective evidence.
When you have an objection to a methodology used, object to that methodology, and point out the problems. When you pretend an entire field is composed of a conspiracy to mislead, you become crazy and the misled party by your own will.
Worse still, you're allowing yourself to subjectively and passively declare things that suit your biases valid, without necessarily having a solid criteria that would also cause you to face the things you might be wrong about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:56PM
By assuming nefarious intent
I didn't see that. Oftentimes they do pull explanations out of nowhere, but that doesn't mean their intent is nefarious. I wish the social sciences were more objective and structured, but the studies often simply aren't.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 11 2017, @07:12PM
But they also very often are. So again, if you have a problem with methodology, say so.
This thread stated with me doing exactly that(really more how the perfectly reasonable methodology got popularized in the media). If you read actual papers, not abstracts, not "science news", you'll find that overwhelmingly sociologists, psychologists, and other "soft" scientists do a very good job of identifying confounding variables, trying to control for them, and providing evidence. Many times, you can spot a shitty paper 10 words into the methodology section.
And good journals(e.g. APA's health psychology) junk those before they see the light of day.