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A Full Bladder Makes You More Responsible
It's not an April fool's joke, we swear! An upcoming study in Psychological Science found that when we’re controlling our bladder, we’re better at controlling ourselves when making decisions about the future. In one experiment, volunteers were asked to either drink a large or small amount of water. Once enough time had passed for the water to reach their bladder, volunteers were asked to choose between receiving a small, but immediate, reward or a larger, but delayed, reward, as a way to assess their self-control. Volunteers who had a full bladder were better at holding out for the larger reward later.
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Think You’ll Ace That Test? Think Again. Then Start Studying
U.S. News & World Report: We hold many beliefs about memory—for instance, if you study more, you learn more. We are also constantly making judgments about particular instances of learning and remembering—I’ll never forget this party! That was easy to understand. I’ll ace it on the test. But do beliefs influence judgments, and how do judgments affect memory performance? “There’s a disconnect among beliefs, judgments, and actual memory,” says Williams College psychologist Nate Kornell. Ask people to predict how or what they will learn and “in many situations, they do a breathtakingly bad job.” Read the whole story: U.S. News & World Report
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Eating something gross makes you more judgmental
MSNBC: Having a bad taste in your mouth from food or drink can lead you to making stronger and harsher judgments of other people and their behaviors, suggests new research. In the study, after participants tasted something they considered physically disgusting, they were more likely to think something was morally disgusting. Interestingly, this effect was significantly stronger in people who were politically conservative than in those with liberal views. The experiment, published in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science was the first to examine how taste perception affects moral judgments.
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Good Manners May Be a Pact to Reduce Physical Effort
U.S. News & World Report (HealthDay): Not only is holding the door open for others a nice gesture, it's also a nod to the physical effort of those involved, researchers report. Their study, to be published in Psychological Science, combined two seemingly unrelated fields -- altruism and motor control. "The way etiquette has been viewed by Emily Post -- that you're being proper by following social codes -- is undoubtedly part of it," David A. Rosenbaum, of Pennsylvania State University, said in a journal news release. "Our insight is there is another contributor: the mental representation of other people's physical effort." Read the whole story: U.S. News & World Report
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Women more likely than men to have a ‘love’ regret: NU study
Chicago Tribune: If asked to name something we regret in our lives, most of us would mention a "love" regret, especially the women among us, a recent study out of Northwestern University shows. When asked, about 44 percent of women and 19 percent of men said they regretted something related to romance, according to the study by the Kellogg School of Management in Evanston. Neal Roese is one of the study's authors and a professor of marketing at the school. He said regrets women mentioned in the survey of 370 adults ages 19 to 103 included "the one that got away" regrets, as well as regrets that they had never entered into a particular relationship.
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New Research From Psychological Science
On the Strength of Connections Between Localist Mental Modules as a Source of Frequency-of-Occurrence Effects Derek Besner, Sarah Moroz, and Shannon O’Malley How do people become familiar with items and events that appear frequently in their lives? To test potential mechanisms, the reaction times to numerical stimuli presented in either Arabic numerals (the more frequent form in which numbers are presented) or words (less frequent) were compared in different tasks. There was a difference in the reaction times between the two formats for a parity judgment task (in which participants indicated whether a number was odd or even) but not for a test in which participants read each stimulus aloud.
