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Super memory, obsessive behavior: Do they share brain space?
Los Angeles Times: Memory researchers at the University of California Irvine are developing a large collection of remarkable research subjects, who themselves maintain a remarkably large collection of memories. They are people with "highly superior autobiographical memories," and UC Irvine researchers so far have found at least 22 -- and possibly as many as 32 subjects in this country alone -- who can remember with extraordinary accuracy and in extraordinary detail the events of their lives and the days on which they occurred.
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Fetus can sense how Mom’s doing psychologically
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Science has learned that a developing fetus receives messages from the mother, everything from hearing mom's heartbeat to the music she might direct toward her belly. But a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the fetus can pick up on signals and respond to a mother experiencing depression. Researchers at the University of California-Irvine recruited pregnant women and checked them for depression before and after the mothers delivered their babies. They also tested the babies after delivery to see how their development was progressing. Read the whole story: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
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2012 Society of Psychologists in Management Conference
The 2012 SPIM Conference and Institutes will be held February 23-26, 2012 in Charleston, South Carolina. For more information visit: http://www.spim.org/conference.htm
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How Cultural Factors and Suicide Risk Interact
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Lillian Polanco from Hunter College present her APSSC Award–winning poster session research on “Cultural Risk and Protective Factors for Depression and Suicidal Ideation.” Polanco and her coauthors Jessica Silver and Regina Miranda examined whether two culture-related variables — acculturative stress and ethnic identity — would prospectively predict depression symptoms and suicidal ideation. At two-year follow-up, the researchers found that baseline acculturative stress predicted depression symptoms and suicidal ideation.
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The First Step to Change: Focusing On the Negative
If you want people to change the current system, or status quo, first you have to get them to notice what’s wrong with it. That’s the idea behind a new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds that people pay attention to negative information about the system when they believe the status quo can change. “Take America’s educational system. You could find some flaws in that system,” says India Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University who did the new study with Professor Kentaro Fujita. “But we have to live with it every day, so people tend to focus on the positive and reinforce the system.
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Wealth inequality: also going up
The Washington Post: Of late, James Pethokoukis, the American Enterprise Institute’s resident economics blogger, has been attempting to “close the case on the inequality myth.” Wednesday’s edition argues that it doesn’t really matter if income inequality has gone up because wealth inequality fell after World War II. I don’t agree with that, but put it aside for a moment.
