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Psychologists who studied shame around the world say it’s an essential part of being human
There’s a school of thought that says shame is a social construct: We only learn to feel inadequate and exposed because our particular culture sends us messages about what falls outside the realm of acceptability. But an international group of psychologists and anthropologists are putting forward an entirely different theory: Perhaps shame is universal—an evolved mechanism that helps us avoid behavior that would make our social group stop valuing us.
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Psychological Study Explores How Bodies Shape First Impressions
When you first meet someone, it’s likely that you judge their personality based on what little information you have. While what we infer from faces has been well studied, new research from The University of Texas at Dallas suggests that people also form first impressions from body shapes. Ying “Nina” Hu, a doctoral student in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, is the lead author of the study, recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Hu works in the Face Perception Research Lab of Dr. Alice O’Toole, professor of cognition and neuroscience and the Aage and Margareta Møller Professor.
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Replication failures in psychology not due to differences in study populations
A large-scale effort to replicate results in psychology research has rebuffed claims that failures to reproduce social-science findings might be down to differences in study populations. The drive recruited labs around the world to try to replicate the results of 28 classic and contemporary psychology experiments. Only half were reproduced successfully using a strict threshold for significance that was set at P < 0.0001 (the P value is a common test for judging the strength of scientific evidence).
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research articles exploring new insights into cognitive behavior therapies and cognitive processes associated with rumination and depression.
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The Trick to Keeping Friends as We Get Older
Two or three times a week, Alan J. Fink, 64, the owner and manager of a box business in Baltimore, listens as his mother wishes out loud that she had good friends to go out with. That is worrisome for his mother, who is 88—and for himself. “I don’t want to be in her position in another 20 years,” Mr. Fink says. He frets that his circle of friends should be wider, “so that, down the pike, we’ll all be available to each other—if and when we need each other.” A growing body of data confirms that friends are essential to our medical, psychological and social well-being as we age. Yet many people find it difficult to maintain their circles of friends as they grow older.
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Bad First Impressions Are Not Set in Stone
Common wisdom holds that negative first impressions are hard to shake—and some research backs this up. But such studies often unfairly compare impressions based on immoral deeds that are extreme and relatively rare (such as selling drugs to kids) with impressions based on kindnesses that are more common (such as sharing an umbrella). A new set of studies involving precisely balanced behaviors finds that people are more willing to change their mind about individuals who initially come off as selfish than about those they deem selfless.
