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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring how infants learn to categorize words and the fidelity of different memory types.
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What’s behind the confidence of the incompetent? This suddenly popular psychological phenomenon.
You may have witnessed this scene at work, while socializing with friends or over a holiday dinner with extended family: Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot. That person might even boast about being an expert. This phenomenon has a name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it’s been around as long as human cognition, though only recently has it been studied and documented in social psychology.
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Eleanor Maccoby, Pathbreaker on How Boys and Girls Differ, Dies at 101
Eleanor Emmons Maccoby, a distinguished psychologist and a pioneer in the field of gender studies who was the first woman to head the Stanford University psychology department, died on Dec. 11 in Palo Alto, Calif. She was 101. Her death, at a retirement community, was confirmed by her son, Mark, who said the cause was pneumonia. Dr. Maccoby, whom the American Psychological Association listed among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, conducted pathbreaking research in child development and gender studies. She explored a wide range of topics, including interactions between parent and child and the effect of divorce on children.
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Context Shapes Choice of Healthy Foods
When choosing between indulgent and healthy foods, your pick may depend on what other foods sit nearby on the grocery shelf.
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Step back to move forward: Setting new priorities in the new year
Happy New Year! As you recover from the festivities and get ready to turn toward your work for 2019 and beyond, this is a great time to take a step back from the day-to-day and check in with yourself to make sure you are actually on the path that’s right for you. In the first Letter to Young Scientists, we encouraged you to focus on studying the questions and topics you find meaningful (acknowledging that those might evolve over time). But in science—and other areas of life—we often get pulled in multiple directions that lead us off our desired paths.
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Jazmine Barnes Case Shows How Trauma Can Affect Memory
Imagine being held up at gunpoint. Do you trust you could remember the perpetrator’s face? The gun? Or would you have a better recollection of how loud the birds were chirping at that moment? “The memory does not operate like a videotape machine faithfully recording every single detail,” said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Remembering Trauma.” “The thing that is happening is that you’re focusing on the most dangerous thing,” he said.
