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Are You a Career Adapter?
Over the course of your career, you’ll change jobs, get promoted, take on new responsibilities, encounter new technologies, and adjust to new supervisors, co-workers and subordinates. You might assume that your ability to navigate through those changes rests in large part on your personality traits. But new behavioral research paints a more nuanced view of what scientists call career adaptability—the ability to manage existing and impending career challenges. An international team of vocational psychologists recently developed a new measure, the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS), to assess how individuals manage their career development.
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Boosting Self-Worth Can Counteract Cognitive Effects of Poverty
For people in poverty, remembering better times — such as past success — improves cognitive functioning by several IQ points and increases their willingness to seek help from crucial aid services, a study finds.
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Inferring Missing Information
Every day people make judgments and decisions, even when they don’t have the necessary information. Ramadhar Singh studied how people, when making predictions about others, infer the missing information from the facts they do have. In his research, Singh first experimentally demonstrated that Predicted gift size = Generosity x Capability (Income). Based on this evidence, he then identified that inferred value of the missing capability information increases with the given value of generosity information. In contrast, inferred value of the missing generosity information is constant usually around the middle level of generosity in the donor.
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Income Inequality Is Rising, But Maybe Not as Fast as You Think
Americans’ perceptions of income inequality are largely over-inflated when compared with actual census data, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “With the genuine rise in wealth inequality over the past several decades, and the popular media’s intensive coverage of this issue, we wondered how income inequality is perceived by the average American,” says psychological scientist John Chambers of St. Louis University.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Behavioral Sensitivity to Reward Is Reduced for Far Objects David A. O'Connor, Bernard Meade, Olivia Carter, Sarah Rossiter, and Robert Hester Does spatial distance affect the ways people respond to rewarding objects? Participants received a reward for correctly identifying red, green, or blue squares and spheres presented in near or far space using a 3-D screen. They received a reward for correct responses, and the magnitude of the reward was linked to the color of the object.
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Scientists and Practitioners Don’t See Eye to Eye on Repressed Memory
Skepticism about repressed traumatic memories has increased over time, but new research shows that psychology researchers and practitioners still tend to hold different beliefs about whether such memories occur and whether they can be accurately retrieved. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Whether repressed memories are accurate or not, and whether they should be pursued by therapists, or not, is probably the single most practically important topic in clinical psychology since the days of Freud and the hypnotists who came before him,” says researcher Lawrence Patihis of the University of California, Irvine.
