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Defining and Shaping Health Psychology
Karen Matthews, renowned for her many contributions to the formation and growth of health psychology, helped set the stage for expansion of the field through her editorship of Health Psychology, advisory roles at National Heart Blood Institute, and through her participation in the landmark National Working Group on Education and Training in Health Psychology. At the University of Pittsburgh, she initiated an innovative Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine training program that provided multidisciplinary training to many individuals who later became leaders in the health psychology field.
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People Seem More Attractive in a Group Than They Do Apart
People tend to be rated as more attractive when they’re part of a group than when they’re alone, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This phenomenon -- first dubbed the “cheerleader effect” by ladykiller Barney Stinson on the popular TV show How I Met Your Mother — suggests that having a few friends around might be an easy way to boost perceived attractiveness.
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Keeping Emotions in Check May Not Always Benefit Psychological Health
Being able to regulate your emotions is important for well-being, but new research suggests that a common emotion regulation strategy called “cognitive reappraisal” may actually be harmful when it comes to stressors that are under our control. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Context is important,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Allison Troy of Franklin & Marshall College.
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New Research from Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research in Clinical Psychological Science: Impaired Decision Making in Alzheimer's Disease: A Deficit of Cognitive Strategy Selection? Pascal Hot, Kylee T. Ramdeen, Céline Borg, Thierry Bollon, and Pascal Couturier People with Alzheimer's disease often have trouble choosing the best decision-making strategy. Could uncertainty about their problem-solving abilities lead people with Alzheimer's to adopt poor decision-making strategies? Participants with and without Alzheimer's watched a film clip meant to induce a positive or a neutral emotional state and then completed the Iowa Gambling Task.
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Emotional Labor Costs
Anybody who has worked in a customer-service position knows how difficult it can be to maintain a smile and good humor in the face of an angry client or customer. In fact, the effort may be more costly than we realize. Alicia A. Grandey, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, has spent a good part of her career studying “emotional labor”—the process of altering one’s behavior or disposition to meet an employer’s expectations. For workers in jobs that require stressful interactions with superiors, co-workers, or customers, the effects of emotional labor can create considerable internal turmoil.
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To Call a Player’s Poker Hand, Look to the Arms
Professional poker players rely on the ability to divorce their facial expressions from their emotional state – no matter how good, or how bad, their hand is, they have to maintain an inscrutable “poker face.” But new research suggests that they may do well to focus on another body part: The arms. The research, published in Psychological Science, suggests that homing in on only the player’s arms may be the most reliable way to call a bluff. Psychological scientist Michael Slepian and colleagues had 78 undergraduate participants watch two-second video clips from the World Series of Poker.