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Understanding Your Mind Is Mission Critical
Scientific American: Earlier this year, Senator Tom Coburn published a report called “Under the Microscope,” in which he criticized the funding of any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important. Of particularly dubious value, in Coburn’s opinion, are the behavioral and social sciences—including my own field, psychology.
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What’s the Skinny on “Fat Talk”?
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Taylor Locker from the University of Florida present her poster session research on “Fat Talk”: Who’s Doing It, Why, and With Whom. Locker and coauthor Kelly Graf interviewed 197 undergraduates—152 women and 45 men—about self-reported use of fat talk, or self-disparaging comments about one’s body to represent and foster body dissatisfaction. Eighty percent of women and approximately half of men were able to recall at least one time in which they explicitly criticized their bodies for being “too fat” or expressed a desire to lose weight.
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APS Fellow Talks Psychological Science With the Dalai Lama
APS Fellow and Former Board member Elke Weber, Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University, and other behavioral and environmental scientists met with the Dalai Lama at the 23 Mind and Life Meeting in Dharamsala, India. The conference, titled “Ecology, Ethics and Interdependence” provided an opportunity to discuss environmental ethics and allowed for a dialogue between top scholars, activists and ecological scientists. Weber is an expert on behavioral models of decision-making under risk and uncertainty She studies psychologically and neurally plausible ways to model individual differences in risk taking and discounting, specifically in environmental decisions.
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Can head shape determine chances of business success?
The Guardian: A new line of American-British research suggests that the shape of a chief executive officer's head can indicate how well his firm will prosper. The shape also predicts whether the chief executive will act immorally. The research offers a mathematical tool that financial analysts can add to their professional kit bag: the chief executive officer's facial width-to-height ratio. The "chief executive facial WHR", for short. The research and its financial implications are outlined in a study called A Face Only an Investor Could Love: Chief Executive Facial Structure Predicts Firm Financial Performance, to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
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Punishment without spanking
CNN: Noël Plummer can't imagine making a conscious decision to inflict physical pain on her 8-year-old daughter as a punishment. She's only slapped her daughter once, without thinking, when her then-5-year-old was having an enormous tantrum. She's never hit her again. While she recognizes that physical punishment may encourage immediate fear-based compliance, "I'm interested in my child respecting my authority and decisions, and adopting my values about appropriate behavior," says Plummer, an attorney living in Albany, California.
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How to find true friends (and love) in 45 minutes
WIRED UK: Can you make someone become intimately close to you -- even fall in love with you -- in less than an hour? Just ask Arthur Aron. Dr Aron -- known to friends as Art -- runs the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in upstate New York, and he has love on his mind. Passionate love, unreciprocated love, romantic attraction, unexpected arousal, pure lust -- all aspects of human intimacy that fascinate this much-published psychology professor specialising in what causes people to fall in and out of love and form other deep relationships ("the self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in personal relationships", as his CV puts it).
