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Amori Yee Mikami
University of Virginia, USA http://people.virginia.edu/~am4jd/ What does your research focus on? Nearly all people can remember someone from his or her own childhood who didn’t get along with the peer group. Yet, when asked why this child had difficulty, most people name behaviors within the disliked child as the source of the problem (e.g., that child couldn’t share; that child told lies). Few consider social contextual factors, such as prejudice in the peer group, or a peer climate that discourages inclusion, that also affect the likelihood that a child will be accepted. I am fascinated by the understudied idea that social contextual factors may influence peer relationships.
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Aaron Kay
Duke University, USA www.fuqua.duke.edu/faculty_research/faculty_directory/kay/ What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the relation between motivation, implicit social cognition, and broad societal issues. I have a particular interest in how basic motivations and needs – including ones that people may not be entirely aware of – manifest as specific social and societal beliefs. These include (but are not limited to) the causes and consequences of stereotyping and system justification, religious and political belief, and the attitudes people hold towards their institutions and social systems. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you?
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Susanne Scheibe
University of Groningen, The Netherlands www.rug.nl/staff/s.scheibe What does your research focus on? I study how emotional experience and emotion regulation change as people age, and how such changes affect important realms of life, such as work life. When looking at the many (mostly negative) changes that accompany aging, emotions clearly stand out. Emotional experience becomes more positive and more stable with age at least until people reach their 70s and 80s. This is actually surprising given that a large part of emotion regulation requires cognitive control, which declines more than other competencies with age.
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People Don’t Just Think with Their Guts; Logic Plays a Role Too
For decades, science has suggested that when people make decisions, they tend to ignore logic and go with the gut. But Wim De Neys, a psychological scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, has a new suggestion: Maybe thinking about logic is also intuitive. He writes about this idea in the January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychologists have partly based their conclusions about reasoning and decision-making on questions like this one: “Bill is 34. He is intelligent, punctual but unimaginative and somewhat lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.
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Betsy Levy Paluck
Princeton University, USA www.betsylevypaluck.com What does your research focus on? I’m interested in prejudice and conflict reduction. I’m especially interested in developing and testing theory using field experiments with real world prejudice and conflict reduction interventions. I’ve worked with media interventions in post-conflict countries in Central and Horn of Africa, and with peer-influence interventions in high schools in the United States. All of this work has gotten me interested in the nature of social change more broadly.
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Earlier Autism Diagnosis Could Mean Earlier Interventions
WKAR Public Radio: Autism is usually diagnosed in children between the ages of two and three or later, but new research shows that it's possible to find symptoms in much younger children and to diagnose autism at 18 to 24 months. Brooke Ingersoll is an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University. She recently wrote a paper on autism published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Ingersoll told WKAR's Gretchen Millich that if children can be diagnosed earlier, it might be possible to prevent them from developing autism. BROOKE INGERSOLL: Autism is a behaviorally-defined disorder. The way you identify it or diagnose it is based on behaviors.
