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What If You Could Just ‘Forget’ to Bite Your Nails?
New York Magazine: A bad habit can feel so automatic that it can be hard to even realize you’re doing it, which makes quitting the behavior feel impossible. But what if you could just will yourself to “forget” to bite your nails, or crack your knuckles, or snack late at night? That’s the gist of a new paper in Psychological Science, which was recently featured in the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. The methodology is a little complicated, but, essentially, the German researchers instilled a habit into their participants, and then changed the rules of the game, requiring them to forget that newly learned behavior. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Love People, Not Pleasure
The New York Times: ABD AL-RAHMAN III was an emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain. He was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his life: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.” Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, you probably have the same problem as the great emir.
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Preschoolers With Special Needs Benefit From Peers’ Strong Language Skills
The guiding philosophy for educating children with disabilities has been to integrate them as much as possible into a normal classroom environment, with the hope that peers’ skills will help bring them up to speed. A new study provides empirical evidence that peers really can have an impact on a child’s language abilities, for better or worse. While peers with strong language skills can help boost their classmates’ abilities, being surrounded by peers with weak skills may hinder kids’ language development. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From <em>Clinical Psychological Science</em>
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Personality Predicts Individual Variation in Fear Learning: A Multilevel Growth Modeling Approach Femke J. Gazendam, Jan H. Kamphuis, Annemarie Eigenhuis, Hilde M. H. Huizenga, Marieke Soeter, Marieke G. N. Bos, Dieuwke Sevenster, and Merel Kindt Studies examining fear learning have generally focused on average responses and have treated individual variation as noise.
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Cultural Stereotypes May Evolve From Sharing Social Information
Millenials are narcissistic, scientists are geeky, and men like sports -- or so cultural stereotypes would have us believe. Regardless of whether we believe them to be true, we all have extensive knowledge of cultural stereotypes. But how does this information become associated with certain groups in the first place? Research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that cultural stereotypes are the unintended but inevitable consequence of sharing social information.
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More Breaks May Help You Go With the “Flow” at Work
Giving employees more breaks and vacation time may actually help improve their performance on the job by increasing their experiences of “flow,” according to new research. It’s common for people to feel tired after work, but after taking time off for a vacation or a fun evening out they’re likely to feel refreshed or recovered. According to the effort-recovery model (ERM), this occurs because people require a reserve of cognitive resources to maintain performance throughout the day. When demands are reduced, such as during leisure time, cognitive resources are restored. In a recent study, a group of psychological scientists led by Maike E.
