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What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Overpriced roses and generic greeting cards are flying off the shelves, only to be thrown in the trash in a day or two. Windows, storefronts, even drab office cubicles are festooned in red and pink hearts. Valentine’s Day is a holiday full of schmaltz, material excess, and, sometimes, a bit of genuine romance. But extravagant gestures and fleeting passion do not a relationship make! So, before things get too sentimental, let’s take a step back and consider how people get in, and out, of romantic relationships in the first place.
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On the Relationship Between Social Class and Prejudice
Studies have indicated that prejudice is more prevalent among people from lower social classes, but researchers are still struggling to understand what might account for this association. In an article published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, a team of researchers led by Héctor Carvacho of Bielefeld University, Germany, examine the role of two ideological attitudes — right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) — in linking aspects of social class to increased levels of prejudice.
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2015 National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology
The 37th Annual National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, cosponsored by the Association for Psychological Science, the University of South Florida Department of Psychology, and the Society for the Teaching of Psychology will be held January 3–6, 2015, at the TradeWinds Island Grand Hotel, in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Registration is limited to 375 participants; early registration is highly recommended. Poster session proposals should be received by October 1, 2014, to guarantee space in the program, although later submissions will be considered if poster space remains available.
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Mindfulness Meditation May Improve Decision Making
A focused 15-minute focused-breathing meditation may help to counteract the deep-rooted sunk cost bias.
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Gordon Gekko on Handling Other People’s Money
In a scene from the 2010 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, financial trader Gordon Gekko — played by Michael Douglas — defines moral hazard as a situation in which “somebody takes your money and he is not responsible for it.” A team of European researchers cite this cinematic example in a recently published study on how people feel when they take economic risks on someone else’s behalf, rather than their own. Scientists from the Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive in France found that when we entrust our money to someone else, they tend to not handle it as carefully as they would their own.
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Cognitive Science Society 36th Annual Conference
The 36th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society will be held July 23–26, 2014, in Quebec City, Canada. Entries to be reviewed may be submitted in categories such as papers, symposia, presentation-based talks, member abstracts, tutorials, and workshops. They may focus on any area of cognitive science. For more information, see the conference home page.