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UAB Nutrition Obesity Research Center Offers 5-Day Summer Courses
UAB's Nutrition Obesity Research Center will be holding two 5-day short courses at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. June: The Mathematical Sciences in Obesity Research The mathematical sciences including engineering, statistics, computer science, physics, econometrics, psychometrics, epidemiology, and mathematics qua mathematics are increasingly being applied to advance our understanding of the causes, consequences, and alleviation of obesity. These applications do not merely involve routine well-established approaches easily implemented in widely available commercial software.
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Psychological Science Gets Behind the Wheel at NHTSA
Last week psychological scientists from around the U.S. gathered in Washington, D.C. to discuss innovative behavioral research that will be used to save thousands of lives. Over 200 million Americans drive a car on any given day, and each year around 30,000 Americans lose their lives in car crashes. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is one of the government agencies tasked with finding ways to keep drivers safe. The newest head of NHTSA, Administrator Mark Rosekind, is an accomplished psychological scientist recognized for his innovative research on human fatigue and performance.
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Wearing a Helmet Tied to Riskier Decision Making
Individuals wearing a bicycle helmet as part of an experiment reported greater sensation seeking and engaged in more risk taking than those wearing a baseball cap, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results suggest that wearing a helmet may have complex and even unintended consequences on the wearer's judgment and decision making. For the study, psychological scientists Tim Gamble and Ian Walker of the University of Bath in the UK used a computer-based simulation to measure sensation-seeking behavior and analyze risk taking in adults ranging in age from 17 to 56 years old.
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NITOP 2017
NITOP 2017 39th ANNUAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON THE TEACHING OF PSYCHOLOGY January 3–6, 2017 TradeWinds Island Grand Resort, St. Pete Beach, Florida Co-sponsored by: The Association for Psychological Science The University of South Florida Department of Psychology Registration is limited to 400 participants; registration by November 15, 2016 is highly recommended. The early conference registration fee is only $10 more than the early registration fee for the January 2016 NITOP for registrations received through November 15, 2016 (regular participant, $555) and after November 15, 2016, the regular participant registration fee will be $605.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Failure of Intuition When Choosing Whether to Invest in a Single Goal or Split Resources Between Two Goals Alasdair D. F. Clarke and Amelia R. Hunt How do people respond when asked to perform two similar tasks simultaneously? In theory, if both tasks are easy, they should divide their attention and try to complete both; however, once the tasks become more demanding, they should change strategies and prioritize one task at the expense of the other. In a series of four studies, participants completed simultaneous detection (Study 1), throwing (Study 2), memory (Study 3), or reaching (Study 4) tasks.
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Why Sports Wins and Sunshine May Lead You to Gamble
A sunny day or the fact that your favorite sports team unexpectedly won yesterday won’t improve your chances of winning the lottery and yet they might increase the likelihood that you’ll buy a ticket.
