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Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming
When your mind drifts, it's hard to remember what was going on before you stopped paying attention. Now a new study has found that the effect is stronger when your mind drifts farther – to memories of an overseas vacation instead of a domestic trip, for example, or a memory in the more distant past. Psychologists have known for a while that context is important to remembering. If you leave the place where a memory was made – its context – it will be harder for you to recall the memory. Previous studies had also found that thinking about something else – daydreaming or mind-wandering – blocks access to memories of the recent past. Psychological scientists Peter F.
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Can I Buy You a Drink? Genetics May Determine Sensitivity to Other People’s Drinking Behavior
Your friend walks into a bar to meet you for happy hour. He sidles up to the bar and orders a drink--does that make you more likely to get a drink yourself? According to new findings reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, genetics may determine the extent to which you are influenced by social drinking cues — signals such as advertisements, drinks placed on a bar, and seeing other people around you drinking. Drinking alcohol increases levels of dopamine — a brain chemical that causes pleasure and makes us feel good. The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) has been shown to be involved in motivation of seeking out rewards.
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Cultural Reactions to Anger Expression can Affect Negotiation Outcomes
Most research on negotiations has shown that showing anger can win you larger concessions, but a psychological study shows it can hurt your cause when used in certain cultural environments.
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Meditation Helps Increase Attention Span
It's nearly impossible to pay attention to one thing for a long time. A new study looks at whether Buddhist meditation can improve a person's ability to be attentive and finds that meditation training helps people do better at focusing for a long time on a task that requires them to distinguish small differences between things they see. The research was inspired by work on Buddhist monks, who spend years training in meditation.
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Keep Your Fingers Crossed! How Superstition Improves Performance
Players’ superstitious rituals may seem silly but research shows that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve performance – by increasing self-confidence.
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A Person’s Language May Influence How He Thinks About Other People
The language a person speaks may influence their thoughts, according to a new study on Israeli Arabs who speak both Arabic and Hebrew fluently. The study found that Israeli Arabs' positive associations with their own people are weaker when they are tested in Hebrew than when they are tested in Arabic. The vast majority of Arab Israelis speak Arabic at home and usually start learning Hebrew in elementary school. The subjects in this study were Arab Israelis, fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic, who were students at Hebrew-speaking universities and colleges.
