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Driving in Rain, Sleet, or Snow? Cognitive Biases Worsen Winter Driving
This winter much of the United States has been battered by snowstorms and record freezing temperatures. But snowflakes and black ice aren’t the only things making winter roads dangerous -- it’s likely that many drivers succumb to common cognitive biases that lead them to overestimate their skill at handling hazardous road conditions. Psychological scientists have long known that people generally tend to view their skills in optimistic terms—regardless of how their abilities actually hold up in reality.
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The Laws of Attraction
A half-century ago, psychologists considered the study of love and attraction unworthy of study. But Ellen S. Berscheid helped make the science of love one of the most vibrant areas of inquiry in modern social science. Berscheid and her collaborator Elaine C. Hatfield helped pioneer an empirical approach to understanding different facets of romantic relationships, including physical attraction, relationship satisfaction, sexuality, and emotional intimacy. She has also studied the importance people place on physical attractiveness, not just when searching for romantic partners but also in other interactions.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: An Assessment of Emotional Reactivity to Frustration of Goal Pursuit in Euthymic Bipolar I Disorder Michael D. Edge, Sandy J. Lwi, and Sheri L. Johnson Do euthymic people with bipolar disorder display greater levels of emotional reactivity than people without bipolar disorder? Participants with euthymic bipolar disorder and participants without bipolar disorder played a computer game that was meant to induce frustration.
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The Right Face for the Job
Picking a leader should be about assessing the experience and skills an individual can bring to the table, but a new study finds that getting ahead may be easier for people with the right facial features. In a study published in The Leadership Quarterly, psychological scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Warwick Business School, and West Point Military Academy found that people were surprisingly good at matching leaders’ faces to their real professions. Study authors Christopher Y. Olivola, Dawn L. Eubanks, and Jeffrey B. Lovelace suggest that we may be choosing leaders, at least in part, based on unconscious biases towards certain facial features.
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Neck Pain Can Be Changed Through Altered Visual Feedback
Using virtual reality to distort how far the neck is turned can actually alter the experience of chronic neck pain.
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Evolution of the Human Brain: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
With our uniquely large brains and extended childhoods, humans are a bit of an evolutionary puzzle. According to a recent article published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, romantic love and the pair-bonding that it motivates may be part of the answer to this evolutionary riddle. Researchers Garth Fletcher of Victoria University in Wellington New Zealand and collaborators Jeffry A. Simpson, Lorne Campbell, and Nickola C. Overall argue that the adaptation of romantic love may have played a key role in the evolution of our big, sophisticated brains and social aptitude. “Evolutionary adaptations typically have a jury-rigged nature, and romantic love is no exception,” says Fletcher.