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Idealistic Thinking Linked With Economic Slump
Envisioning a bright future should pave the way for success, right? Maybe not. Research suggests that thinking about an idealized future may actually be linked with economic downturn, not upswing. “[F]antasizing about having attained a desired future may lead people to mentally enjoy the idealized future in the here and now,” explain researchers A. Timur Sevincer of the University of Hamburg and colleagues.
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By the Numbers
Studies on human development have shown that even as infants, we have an approximate sense of numbers and amounts. How does this underlie our ability to perform complex calculations? Stanislas Dehaene explores this question through neuroscience. He has used brain imaging to study how the human mind processes numeracy, as well as language. Through his work he has found brain regions specifically involved in mathematical thinking, including the distinction between subtraction and multiplication. Dehaene has also uncovered the neural activity at the core of conscious awareness and experience.
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Head Start’s 12th National Research Conference on Early Childhood
Head Start's 12th National Research Conference on Early Childhood will be held July 7–9, 2014 at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, DC. For more information visit www.hsrconference.net.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Feature-Binding Errors After Eye Movements and Shifts of Attention Julie D. Golomb, Zara E. L'Heureux, and Nancy Kanwisher In this study, the authors examined distortions in feature binding that might occur after eye movements. Participants were shown four color blocks -- one in a precued spatiotopic (world-centered) location -- that appeared after an eye movement. When participants indicated the color of the block appearing at the cued location using a color wheel, their reports were systematically shifted toward the color of the distractor in the retinotopic (eye-centered) location of the cue.
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Cognitive Style as Environmentally Sensitive Individual Differences in Cognition: A Modern Synthesis and Applications in Education, Business, and Management
Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) The idea that people differ in the way they acquire and process information is not a new one. As early as the 1950s, researchers were examining the idea that people had different cognitive styles -- individually different manners of cognitive processing and functioning. Although this area of research fell out of favor in mainstream psychology during the late 1970s, it continued to be of interest in applied fields such as education and business.
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Treatment Tracker
One of the biggest challenges psychotherapists face is deciding on the appropriate treatment for individual patients. Wolfgang Lutz is an internationally recognized researcher on psychotherapy, and is leading the field in collecting important data about treatment effectiveness and results. He has pioneered the concept of expected treatment response (ETR), which involves an individualized log of each patient’s progress in relation to their expected response to the therapy. His work is helping providers to deliver proven and individually tailored treatment plans and to pre-emptively spot patients at risk for treatment failure.
