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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Orthographic Coding in Illiterates and Literates Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Karla Orihuela, and Manuel Carreiras Does literacy shape the way letter strings are visually processed? Literate and illiterate adults performed perceptual matching tasks in which they indicated whether a target string of symbols was the same or different from a previously presented reference string of symbols. "Different" character strings were created by changing the position of characters (transposed-characters condition) or by replacing one character in the string with a new character (replaced-characters condition).
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Will the Great Recession Spawn Humble CEOs?
For years, social scientists have been interested in narcissism among America’s corporate titans. Narcissistic CEOs are known for their self-promotion, excessive self-regard, and tendency to draw attention to themselves. They also tend to embrace risk and lead companies that either perform fantastically well or catastrophically poorly. One signal of a narcissistic CEO is relative pay. Narcissistic CEOs pay themselves considerably more than other members of their top management team. CEOs have some control over their own pay and almost complete control over the pay of other executives.
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Mothers’ Symptoms of Depression Predict How They Respond to Child Behavior
Depressive symptoms seem to focus mothers' responses on minimizing their own distress, which may come at the expense of focusing on the impact their responses have on their children, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Depressive symptoms are common among mothers, and these symptoms are linked with worse developmental outcomes for children. The new study, which followed 319 mothers and their children over a two-year period, helps to explain why parenting competence seems to deteriorate as parents' symptoms of depression increase.
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Throwback Thursday: The Psychology Behind its Success
CNN: FORTUNE -- I archive dive almost every Thursday, searching for the perfect photograph: a shot from one of college's many Ugly Sweater parties; my best friend and I, 20 pounds lighter, grinning at prom; my sisters and I huddled together in 1996, our matching bowl cuts perfectly aligned. With a little help from the slight aging powers of the Valencia filter, my picture-perfect memories are posted to Instagram -- never without the beloved #tbt hashtag. I'm far from Instagram's only wistful user. To date, more than 228 million photos have been tagged with a "Throwback Thursday" hashtag -- either #tbt or #throwbackthursday -- indicating the use of a crowd-pleasing photo from days gone by.
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Apps Intended to Speed Up Reading Rate May Reduce Comprehension
The Washington Post: Readers of this space learned a few weeks ago about Spritz, an app that promises to dramatically increase your reading speed by converting text to a fast-moving sequence of individual words or phrases. Because the text is moving, your eyeballs don’t have to, so you get through words faster. Such speed-reading apps have been getting a lot of attention, but a newstudy published in the journal Psychological Science warns of a downside: You may read faster but learn less.
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Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)
The Atlantic: The idea of the emblem is obvious: This is an illustration of a trophy with an abstract soccer ball on top. The colors—green, yellow, and blue—mirror the host country's flag. Now consider this tweet from copywriter Holly Brockwell, which got 2,400 thousand retweets: "CANNOT UNSEE: the Brazil 2014 logo has been criticised for 'looking like a facepalm.'" ... I couldn't find anyone who studies the really specific cannot-unsee phenomenon that I'm talking about here. But Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino has been studying phenomena like this for decades. He sent me a famous image from the academic literature that gets at what's happening with the World Cup logo.
