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Even Babies Know What's Fair
At a playground, it’s not uncommon to hear the refrain, “That’s not fair!” It seems that young children worry a lot about fairness, but psychological scientists have typically assumed that kids don’t start to understand morality until they reach their preschool years. New research, however, on 19- to 21-month-olds has indicated that sensitivity to fairness might begin a lot earlier. and her colleagues performed two experiments designed to test infants’ sense of fairness. The first experiment involved a female experimenter giving toy ducks, cookies, or toy cars to giraffe puppets. In one trial, the experimenter distributed the goodies equally between the two puppets.
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Right Hand or Left? How the Brain Solves a Perceptual Puzzle
When you see a picture of a hand, how do you know whether it’s a right or left hand? This “hand laterality” problem may seem obscure, but it reveals a lot about how the brain sorts out confusing perceptions. Now, a study which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the long-held consensus about how we solve this problem. “For decades, the theory was that you use your motor imagination,” says Shivakumar Viswanathan, who conducted the study with University of California Santa Barbara colleagues Courtney Fritz and Scott T. Grafton.
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A New Future for Clinical Science
Richard McFall’s work has spanned several areas of research including social competence and information processing, psychopathology, and classical conditioning. Throughout his career he has demonstrated a commitment to the use of scientifically valid techniques and treatments. In his Manifesto For A Science of Clinical Psychology he outlined his views on the importance of the integration of science and practice, both in the field, and in the training of the next generation of clinicians. His Manifesto was an instrumental call to action that led to the creation of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science (APCS) and McFall served as its founding president.
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Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds
The Guardian: Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media. A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory. Read the full story: The Guardian
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Clinical Psychological Science – A New Journal
The Association for Psychological Science is pleased to announce the launch of Clinical Psychological Science (CPS), a unique new journal in scope and mission. Under Founding Editor Alan E. Kazdin, Yale University, CPS will present cutting-edge work from psychological science, broadly conceived, as well as from the full range of related disciplines (e.g., genetics, neuroscience, psychiatry, public health) that contribute to clinical study. CPS's emphasis on integrating diverse scientific perspectives and on boundary-crossing research distinguishes it from traditional journals and places it at the forefront of an exciting new era in clinical science.
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A New Study Shows How to Boost the Power of Pain Relief, Without Drugs
Placebos reduce pain by creating an expectation of relief. Distractions relieve it by keeping the brain busy. When combined, they make for a potent pain reliever, a study shows.