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Negative Emotional Cues Send Drivers to Distraction
Driver distraction is one of the leading causes of motor vehicle accidents. In 2013 alone, 3,154 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes involving distracted drivers, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Obvious distractions, like talking on a cell phone, can contribute to accidents by physically diverting a driver’s attention away from the road. But scientists are finding that more subtle emotional cues in our environment can also have a potentially dangerous influence on attention and, ultimately, our driving behavior.
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Older Workers Possess Unique Cognitive Strengths
Although some abilities tend to decline over time, new research finds that other cognitive skills actually improve with age. Scientists have long known that our ability to analyze novel problems and reason logically, also known as fluid intelligence, peaks around age 20 and then begins a slow decline. However, two new studies confirm that skills related to crystallized intelligence—made up of a person’s acquired knowledge and experience—appear to peak later in life, often after age 40. In a study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, psychological scientist Rachael M.
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Extraversion May Be Less Common Than We Think
Social scientists have long known that, statistically speaking, our friends are more popular than we are. It’s a simple matter of math: Because popular people have more friends, they are disproportionately represented in social networks—which guarantees that on average, our friends have more friends than we do. New research by researchers Daniel C. Feiler and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College extends this so-called "friendship paradox" with a study of personality, documenting a “network extraversion bias” within the emerging social networks of a new class of MBA students.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: An Event-Based Account of Conformity Diana Kim and Bernhard Hommel Why do people conform to the behaviors and judgments of others? In two sessions, female participants rated the attractiveness of faces on a scale of 1 to 8. In the first session only, after each picture, participants were shown a number or a short video clip of someone pushing a number button. Participants' attractiveness ratings in the second session were influenced by the number and video presentations shown in the first rating session. The authors posit that actions people take and the events they perceive are coded in a common format.
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Walking at Lunchtime Buffers Against Workplace Stress
Taking a lunch hour stroll was shown to have a positive influence on people’s mood, enthusiasm, and perception of performance at work.
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Old (Commuting) Habits Die Hard
Convincing people to switch from driving their car to taking the bus to work isn’t easy. But when the environmental charity group WWF announced that it would be moving its United Kingdom headquarters to another town, psychological scientists Ian Walker, Gregory O. Thomas, and Bas Verplanken of the University of Bath saw a golden opportunity for studying the influence of habit on commuting behavior. Commuting the same way day after day, people don’t typically weigh the particular pros and cons of different modes of transit. Rather, people tend to carefully weigh their options when they first start using a particular route.
