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Social Constraints Can Spark Creativity in Diverse Groups
It’s often assumed that creativity is unleashed by removing constraints, but new research finds that establishing clear expectations for social interactions actually encouraged creativity among mixed-sex work groups. A team of psychological scientists, led by Jack Goncalo of Cornell University, wanted to test whether a politically correct environment would dampen people’s creativity — or whether clear social boundaries would actually encourage diverse groups of people to share novel ideas.
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Attention to Angry Faces May Predict Future Depression
Using eye-tracking technology, researchers have found that women with a history of depression tend to spend more time looking at the angry faces compared to women with no history of depression.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Competence Judgments Based on Facial Appearance Are Better Predictors of American Elections Than of Korean Elections Jinkyung Na, Seunghee Kim, Hyewon Oh, Incheol Choi, and Alice O'Toole To examine cultural differences in the importance of face-trait judgments, the researchers showed American and Korean participants pairs of images consisting of both the winner and the runner-up of an American or a Korean election. For each image pair, participants indicated which person they thought was the most competent and which person they would be most likely to vote for.
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Shoham Honored Posthumously for Contributions to Family Research
Late APS Board Member Varda Shoham was recognized posthumously as a recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Family Systems Research Award at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA). Her husband Michael Rohrbaugh, a clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at George Washington University, shared the award with Shoham.
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Cognitive Costs of Crossing the Street Increase with Age
On average, a pedestrian in the US is killed in a car-related accident every 2 hours and injured every 7 minutes, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But children aren’t the ones at greatest risk of a deadly collision with a car– seniors are. A CDC analysis of pedestrian traffic deaths from 2001-2010 concluded that the risk of death actually increases with age. Children under age 15 had the lowest risk of dying as the result of a collision with a vehicle; people over the age of 75 were more than twice as likely to be killed by a car compared to pedestrians overall.
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How Did Humans Learn to Count? Baboons May Offer Clues
Learning to count comes early in life for humans. Most kids know how to count before they enter formal schooling and the ability to understand basic quantities is fundamental to everyday life. Researchers at the University of Rochester wanted to know whether the cognitive underpinnings for this important ability might be found in some of our close cousins: baboons. "Nonhuman animals do not use words like one, two, and three, or numerals like 1, 2, and 3, to “count” in the way that humans do. Nonetheless, it is well established that monkeys and other animals can approximate quantities without these symbolic labels," researcher Jessica Cantlon and colleagues write.
