Rachel Rosenbloom, a Northeastern University law professor who specializes in immigration policy, said it makes sense for attorneys general to concentrate their efforts on the lawsuit in Seattle, because the restraining order Robart issued applied nationwide. She added that “there’s nothing unusual with states joining together to challenge a federal policy,” noting several states joined […]

One widely shared study from last fall, conducted in part by researchers at Harvard and Northeastern, suggested that people with a greater number of Facebook friends were less likely to die than less sociable counterparts. But those same results revealed another surprise: The Facebook behaviors most closely associated with reduced mortality seemed to involve activity […]

If the leaked documents are verified, it could have major security implications for Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and all other tech companies. However, it’s not exactly a surprise that these devices are able to be hacked, said Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University. “In the computer security world, it is widely known that […]

In her new book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Barrett – a psychology professor at Northeastern University and psychiatry lecturer at Harvard Medical School, argues that the brain is not a system of separate parts – with an amygdala serving as the brain’s 911 operator, while the […]

“As you harden the land border you open up the maritime border,” argued Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who is director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. “It makes no sense. You are going to have this balloon effect.” The budget numbers POLITICO reviewed are an opening salvo, and agencies are […]

This plan could also undermine border security itself, considering that the Coast Guard intercepted thousands of undocumented migrants last year. “As you harden the land border you open up the maritime border,” Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander and director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, told Politico. “It makes no sense.”

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets […]

The “classical view” of emotion — a bundle of ideas dating back to the ancient Greeks — says that emotions are best described as something that happen to you. In this line of thinking, emotions are the antagonist of cool, calculated intellect; each emotion has a particular “center” in your brain and “expression” on your […]

Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno presented his and some other studies in The New York Times, concluding, “Living through hardship doesn’t either warm hearts or harden them; it does both.” Research, in this case, lines up with common sense: Life experience has some impact on empathy, but not a direct and simple one.

Not everyone agrees, however, that studying emotions this way—as averages of many people’s brains while they undergo a stimulus—makes sense. Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Made (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), who was not involved in either study, says that so far no one has clearly demonstrated […]

Pick up any psychology textbook or read Wikipedia, and you’ll see some variation of that story: that emotions are inherited through natural selection and located in specific parts of the brain that trigger distinct reactions — the “fingerprints” of emotion — in the face and body. See a snake slither across your path, for example, […]