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U.S. Immigrants Get Supersized
Live Science: Immigrants to the United States may be packing on the pounds, in part, because of a desire to fit in with the citizens of their new country, a new study suggests. Immigrants and their children are known to put on weight after moving to the United States, with some approaching levels of obesity within 15 years. While the abundance of junk food in the American diet no doubt plays a role in their weight gain, immigrants and their families may choose typical American dishes as a way to show that they belong and to prove themselves as Americans, the new study finds. Read the whole story: Live Science
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Dusting for Fingerprints – It Ain’t CSI
Fingerprints – dozens of crime dramas revolve around them. The investigators find the victim, dust for fingerprints, run them through a computer program and -voilá- the guilty party is quickly identified and sent to prison. If only it were that easy. The reality is that this common but crucial part of an investigation is done by humans, not by computers. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals that the human factor in the process could lead to errors and false convictions of innocent people.
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Psychologists Discover We’ve Been Underestimating the Unconscious Mind
What does consciousness do? Theories vary, but most neurologists and cognitive psychologists agree that we need awareness for integration. That is, unconscious processing can take in one object or word at a time. But when it comes to pulling together disparate stimuli into a coherent, complex scene, consciousness gets to work. Now, new research by four Israeli psychologists—Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University, and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of Hebrew University of Jerusalem—suggests that scientists have been underestimating the abilities of the unconscious mind. “Integration can happen even when we’re unaware of the stimulus,” says Mudrik.
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On 9/11, Americans may not have been as angry as you thought they were
The Financial: On September 11, 2001, the air was sizzling with anger—and the anger got hotter as the hours passed. That, anyway, was one finding of a 2010 analysis by Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, and Boris Egloff of 85,000 pager messages sent that day. The researchers employed a commonly used tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, which teases out information from the frequency of word usages in texts. But were Americans really so angry? Clemson University psychologist Cynthia L. S. Pury wasn't out to answer that question when she made the discovery that was just published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Psychologists Put “Character” Under the Microscope–and it Vanishes
Scientific American: What can science reveal about our “character” — that core of good, or evil, that shapes our moral behavior? The answer, according to a new book, is that there may not be much of a core, after all. In “Out of Character,” scientists David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdelsolo argue that how we think about character — a conception that dates back to at least the ancient Greeks — is deeply flawed. Our moral behavior, to a surprising degree, is shaped by the context in which we find ourselves. Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook spoke recently with DeSteno about the book, and the broader implications of the new science. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Immunity in the Mind
Do our own prejudices and perceptions of people help defend our bodies against infectious disease? An article published in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that our brains contain a sort of "behavioral immune system" that defends against disease even before disease-causing pathogens reach our bodies. Mark Schaller, of the University of British Columbia, who co-authored the article with Justin H.
