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Need to Solve a Personal Problem? Try a Third-Person Perspective
Why is it that when other people ask for advice about a problem, we always seem to have sage words at the ready, but when we ourselves face a similar situation, we feel stumped about what to do? In a 2014 Psychological Science article, researchers Igor Grossmann (University of Waterloo) and APS Fellow Ethan Kross (University of Michigan) suggested that people’s tendency to reason more wisely about others’ social problems than they do about their own is a common habit — one they referred to as Solomon’s Paradox. In a series of studies, the researchers not only found evidence of Solomon’s Paradox, but also identified a way that this reasoning bias can be eliminated.
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Feeding Mental Health Through Nutritional Interventions
Depression treatments include both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy, but a burgeoning area of research points to another potent therapy: nutrition
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News Anchor Brian Williams and the Science of Memory
Memory distortion has become a hot topic this week in the wake of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams’s admission of falsely recounting one of his experiences during coverage of the Iraq War. For years, Williams talked about riding in a helicopter that was ultimately forced down after taking fire during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But this week he publicly apologized and admitted that he had been mistaken after reports surfaced that he was not in that particular aircraft, but in a following helicopter. Williams said he made a mistake in recalling the incident, having conflated video he had seen with his own experience.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Targeted Rejection Predicts Decreased Anti-Inflammatory Gene Expression and Increased Symptom Severity in Youth With Asthma Michael L. M. Murphy, George M. Slavich, Edith Chen, and Gregory E. Miller Targeted rejection -- the intentional rejection of a person by an individual or group -- seems to be a uniquely damaging form of interpersonal stress. Participants between the ages of 9 and 18 with diagnosed asthma were assessed every 6 months for 2 years. At each assessment, participants underwent a blood draw and a stress interview and reported their daily asthma symptoms for 2 weeks following each visit.
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Countering “Neuromyths” in the Movies
After a head injury sustained in a plane crash, CIA assassin Jason Bourne wakes up floating in the Mediterranean Sea with two bullets in his back, a Swiss bank account code implanted in his hip, and no memory of who is or how he ended up in the open ocean. Bourne is afflicted with no memory whatsoever of his identity or life before the accident. Even with the severe retrograde amnesia Bourne experiences in the movie The Bourne Identity, it’s dubious that he would also lose all sense of his identity. In fact, complete memory loss after a head injury — often reversed after another blow to the head — is a common but rather preposterous representation of brain damage or amnesia.
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Increasing Individualism in US Linked with Rise of White-Collar Jobs
Rising individualism in the United States over the last 150 years is mainly associated with a societal shift toward more white-collar occupations, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, which looked at various cultural indicators — including word usage in books, trends in baby names, and shifts in family structure — suggests that a shift toward greater individualism is systematically correlated with socioeconomic trends, but not with trends in urbanization or environmental demands such as frequency of diseases or disasters.
