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The Nature of Empathy and Compassion
Tania Singer is recognized as a world expert on empathy and compassion, and takes an interdisciplinary approach to study social and moral emotions such as fairness, envy, compassion, and revenge. In addition to brain imaging, her research methods include also game theoretical and psychological tasks, virtual reality environments and measuring biological markers such as the stress hormone cortisol. In a landmark 2004 study, she discovered that some of the same brain regions that are active when we feel pain also react to the knowledge that a loved one is being hurt. Those findings provided evidence that empathy on some level is an automatic, physiological response.
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Memory Science and the Kennedy Assassination
In the same way a flash camera captures a moment in time, decisive events create vivid, long-lasting, and poignant memories. And many of those memories are wrong.
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Work Disputes Less Troubling When They Involve the Job Itself
We all have colleagues that we simply don’t like. Those personal frictions color our attitudes throughout the day and even after work. But if a run-in with a co-worker involves a specific work-related dispute, the tensions tend to abate rather quickly, a new study shows. A research team led by Laurenz Meier, an industrial/organizational psychologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, examined how people’s reported feelings of anger varied from day to day. Meier and her colleagues asked 131 participants to keep diaries about their moods before and after work over a two-week period.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: A Dissociation of Performance and Awareness During Binocular Rivalry Daniel H. Baker and John R. Cass In binocular rivalry, a different image is shown to each eye and awareness of the images alternates between eyes over time. Interestingly, researchers find that people still show some sensitivity to images presented to the suppressed eye. To determine how this might happen, the researchers measured participants' sensitivity to probes presented to a single eye during periods of suppression or dominance.
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Visual System ‘Prioritizes’ Information for Conscious Access
We are continuously flooded with sensory information from our physical environment – the sights, sounds, smells, feel of everything around us. We’re flooded with so much information, in fact, that we’re not consciously aware of much of it. “Considering that people are continuously presented with vast amounts of sensory information, a system is needed to select and prioritize the most relevant information,” Surya Gayet and colleagues write. The researchers surmised that, in the case of vision, visual working memory (VWM) may be that selection system.
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Collaboration Can Breed Overconfidence
Teamwork isn’t always a reliable approach to strategic planning, problem solving, or simple execution of tasks.
