-
Background Music Influences Buying Behavior
Background music has a surprisingly strong influence on what products consumers buy and how much they’re willing to pay for them, according to a new study from psychological scientists Adrian North and Lorraine Sheridan of Curtin University and Charles Areni of Macquarie University. North and colleagues hypothesized that specific songs or musical genres could prime congruent concepts in a person’s memory, ultimately shifting people’s preferences and buying behavior. Hearing Edith Piaf in the grocery store may then be just the thing to nudge a buyer to choose a French wine over an Italian or South African one.
-
Stress Affects How Men and Women Provide Support to Partners
Men and women both provide strong support to their partners, but women tend to do a better job of being supportive under stressful situations.
-
Mindfulness May Make Memories Less Accurate
The mechanism that seems to underlie the benefits of mindfulness might also affect people’s ability to determine the origin of a given memory.
-
Why Men Still Edge Out Women in Tech Jobs
The world’s top tech companies have realized that unconscious bias is bad for business. Elite companies like Facebook and Google are worried that subtle prejudices—for example, the implicit attitude that men are better than women at math and science—are leading hiring managers to unwittingly skip over the most competent, qualified candidates. "The tech industry overall has this belief that it's the most meritocratic industry of all and that bias and discrimination do not have a home here,” said Brian Welle, director of people analytics at Google, in USA Today.
-
New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Impaired Retrieval Inhibition of Threat Material in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Katharina Kircanski, Douglas C. Johnson, Maria Mateen, Robert A. Bjork, and Ian H. Gotlib People with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) often experience intrusive thoughts and have a bias for threat-related information. One reason proposed for this is that people with GAD may have impaired retrieval inhibition for threat material. Participants with and without GAD were assessed for anxiety and completed a retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm.
-
Waking Up to Dangers of Drowsy Driving
We need to wake up to the fact that sleep is a vital component to safe driving, says psychological scientist Frank McKenna of the University of Reading. The link between sleep and driving safety is