Bruce Bower

Bruce Bower

Behavioral Sciences Writer

Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences since 1984. He often writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues. Bruce has a master's degree in psychology from Pepperdine University and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Following an internship at Science News in 1981, he worked as a reporter at Psychiatric News, a publication of the American Psychiatric Association, until joining Science News as a staff writer. In 1996, the American Psychological Association appointed Bruce a Science Writer Fellow, with a grant to visit psychological scientists of his own choosing. Early stints as an aide in a day school for children and teenagers with severe psychological problems and as a counselor in a drug diversion center provided Bruce with a surprisingly good background for a career in science journalism.

All Stories by Bruce Bower

  1. Bipolar kids harbor unique brain trait

    Children and teenagers with bipolar disorder, a severe mental ailment that involves sharp mood swings, display unusually low tissue volume in a brain area involved in learning to regulate emotions.

  2. Archaeology

    Judeo-Christian ties buried in Rome

    New radiocarbon dates from one of ancient Rome's underground cemeteries, or catacombs, indicates that these structures were built in the Jewish community more than a century before early Christians started to do the same.

  3. Reflections of Primate Minds: Mirror images strike monkeys as special

    Capuchin monkeys don't react to their own mirror images as they do to strangers, perhaps reflecting an intermediate stage of being able to distinguish oneself from others.

  4. Anthropology

    People fired up Aussie extinctions

    Early Australian settlers may have altered the continent's landscape around 50,000 years ago, leading to the extinction of many animal species.

  5. Hypnosis subdues the visual brain

    Hypnotic suggestions to perceive written words as gibberish depress activity in brain areas responsible for vision, possibly reflecting a hypnosis-induced decline in attention paid to visual objects.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Heartening Responses: Depression drugs may aid survival after heart attack

    Depressed patients recovering from heart attacks receive big heart-health benefits by taking prescribed doses of the antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

  7. Night of the Crusher

    Sleep paralysis, a kind of waking nightmare experienced by people in all cultures, sometimes plays a key role in post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks and contributes to widespread beliefs in various spirits and supernatural beings.

  8. Mother Knows Worst: Abusive parenting spans generations in monkeys

    Many female rhesus monkeys who were abused as infants by their mothers do the same to their own infants, raising the prospect of using these animals as a model for human child abuse.

  9. Monkeys keep track of small numbers

    Monkeys show signs of knowing when the number of faces that they see matches the number of voices that they hear, leading a research team to conclude that these primates possess basic counting skills.

  10. Placebo gives brain emotional break

    Placebo-instigated anxiety reduction is accompanied by sparse activity in emotional parts of the brain as well as by intense responses in neural structures that dampen pain, a new brain-scan study finds.

  11. Personable Brain Cells: Neurons as virtuosos of face, object recognition

    Individual neurons in one part of the brain may assist in forming memories for specific sights, including the faces of famous people and images of well-known buildings.

  12. Archaeology

    Ancient Glassmakers: Egyptians crafted ingots for Mediterranean trade

    New archaeological finds indicate that by about 3,250 years ago, Egypt had become a major glass producer and exporter.