-
How ‘Social’ Is Social Networking?
Huffington Post: I like Facebook. I've been signing into the site fairly regularly for a couple years now, and it has become my large extended family's primary form of communication. It also keeps me connected with friends and former colleagues -- people I like a lot but would never stay in touch with otherwise. We share photos, update personal news, comment on politics and pop culture -- nothing serious, but it's still more connection than I would have in a previous era. In that sense, Facebook is certainly a social lubricant for many of its 500 million users, facilitating fast and effortless and widespread connection.
-
Optimism, Race, and Blood Pressure
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Bryan Jensen from Brigham Young University present his poster session research entitled “Race/Ethnic Differences in Ambulatory Blood Pressure Might Not Be Optimal.” To conduct this APSSC Award–winning research, Jensen and his coauthors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Patrick R. Steffen recruited 582 adults to participate in a 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) study.
-
How Do Whites Perceive Biracial People?
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Sabrica Barnett from The City University of New York present her poster research on “Not Fully Black, but Not Fully White: Whites’ Perceptions of Black-White Biracials.” Barnett and her coauthor Daryl A. Wout won an APSSC Award for this research, in which they compared Whites’ ratings of perceived similarity, competence, and warmth for Blacks, Whites, and Black/White biracials.
-
NIA Grants for Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics of Aging
Purpose: The National Institute on Aging (NIA) issues these Program Announcements with special review to stimulate interdisciplinary aging-relevant research in the social, affective and economic neurosciences. The NIA invites applications examining social, emotional and economic behaviors of relevance to aging, using approaches that examine mechanisms and processes at both (a) the social, behavioral or psychological (emotional, cognitive, motivational) level, and (b) the neurobiological or genetic level. Proposals are encouraged that have an overriding emphasis on economic, social or emotional processes and associated genetic or neurobiological processes.
-
Change in Mother’s Mental State Can Influence Her Baby’s Development Before and After Birth
As a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this includes signals about the mother’s mental state. If the mother is depressed, that affects how the baby develops after it’s born. In recent decades, researchers have found that the environment a fetus is growing up in—the mother’s womb—is very important. Some effects are obvious. Smoking and drinking, for example, can be devastating.
-
Curiosity Makes for Better Students
U.S. News & World Report: Curiosity may be dangerous for cats but it's great if you're a student, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed data from some 50,000 students who took part in about 200 studies and found that curiosity was as strong as conscientiousness in influencing academic performance. Together, curiosity and conscientiousness are as important as intelligence in getting good grades, the researchers concluded. The study appears in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science. Read the full story: U.S. News & World Report