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How to Design an Effective Plea for Donations
Pacific Standard: You know those pleas for donations you get in the mail—the ones that prominently feature a picture of a hungry, or otherwise endangered, child? Why do you glance at some before throwing them into the recycling, while others inspire you to reach for your checkbook? Two newly published studies suggest it largely depends on how savvy the respective charities are in pushing certain psychological buttons. One finds that requests featuring a single child are more effective than those with multiple faces. A second suggests that child had better not be too attractive. Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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Can Youth Sports Predict Career Success?
The Wall Street Journal: High school sports experience translates into better success in the workplace, according to a Cornell biodata study. Cornell University's Kevin Kniffin, the study's co-author joins the News Hub. Watch the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Insecurity at the Borderline
The Huffington Post: Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who has represented Mississippi since 1978, this week used a clever psychological strategy to fend off a primary challenge from the right wing of the party. "The Tea Party," he confessed on a final campaign swing, "is something I don't really know a lot about." Nobody believes that. Cochran hasn't been living in a cave. What he was doing, very effectively, was marginalizing his Tea Party rival, playing on the insecurities of a GOP "fringe" faction within the party's establishment. And his opponent took the bait, reacting with hostility toward the powerful incumbent and behaving ungraciously in defeat.
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The Mad-Genius Paradox: Creativity Could Be Tied To Both Sanity And Madness
Fast Company: You can probably recite, off the top of your head, at least a few creative geniuses who seemed out of their mind. We used Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, and Michael Jackson as examples in our piece on creativity and madness last fall. That story surveyed recent evidence linking the two areas--especially the idea that creative types and other people who are vulnerable to mental illness share certain cognitive traits, such as a failure to filter out useless information. Not all scientists are on board with the "mad genius" concept.
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Developmental Psychology’s Weird Problem
Slate: Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past few years, I’ve gotten used to lots of things that would probably seem strange in other cities. Commuting on a unicycle? Sure. Rampant midday nudity? Everywhere. Vegan dinner fundraiser for your Burning Man art car? Of course. So I hardly bat an eye when a 4-year-old says, “My favorite food is edamame.” As a developmental psychologist, I test children to learn basic facts about kids, such as how they learn language, navigate social interactions, and gain knowledge. These things seem like they should work about the same way for any young human.
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Taking an Integrative Approach to Understanding Emotions and Clinical Disorders
Many clinical psychological disorders, including anxiety and depression, are characterized by unhealthy, turbulent, or otherwise maladaptive emotions. Yet the link between emotion and mental illness has typically been investigated separately from basic research on emotion and emotional experience. A Special Series on Emotions and Psychopathology in the new issue of Clinical Psychological Science aims to link these two areas of investigation, bringing the most recent research from affective science to bear on the ways that clinicians and researchers think about, diagnose, and treat clinical disorders.
