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The New Science of Mind
The New York Times: These days it is easy to get irritated with the exaggerated interpretations of brain imaging — for example, that a single fMRI scan can reveal our innermost feelings — and with inflated claims about our understanding of the biological basis of our higher mental processes. Such irritation has led a number of thoughtful people to declare that we can never achieve a truly sophisticated understanding of the biological foundation of complex mental activity.
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Older Adults Gauge Their Partner’s Feelings Through Knowing, Not Seeing
Compared to younger adults, older people are less adept at reading emotion in their spouse’s face. But when their spouse isn’t present, older and younger adults are equally able to discern their significant others’ moods. These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that older adults retain the ability to make accurate judgments about others' emotions using their acquired knowledge, but not sensory cues. “When judging others’ emotions in real life, people do not exclusively rely on emotional expressions,” says lead researcher Antje Rauers of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany.
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Young Adults Reminisce About Music From Before Their Time
Research suggests that young adults today are fond of and have an emotional connection to the music that was popular for their parents’ generation.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. From Glue to Gasoline: How Competition Turns Perspective Takers Unethical Jason R. Pierce, Gavin J. Kilduff, Adam D. Galinsky, and Niro Sivanathan Perspective taking is thought be beneficial for social interactions. In the second of four studies examining whether this is always true, participants were asked to imagine they were going to engage in a negotiation with a person they had cooperated with (cooperation condition) or competed against (competition condition) in the past. Participants were asked to imagine the negotiation from their own (baseline) or the other person's (perspective-taking) point of view.
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Anxiety Limits Our Ability to Discriminate Faces and Speech
Anxiety can impair our accuracy on face- and word-recognition tasks, providing another possible source of fallibility in eyewitness testimony, according to research presented in two reports published in Psychological Science. In the first report, participants were asked to breathe through a mask that provided normal air or a mask that provided CO2-enriched air, a reliable method of inducing anxiety. The participants were then asked to discriminate between similar sounding phonemes, or letter sounds. For instance, though the /g/ and /k/ sounds are similar in “gift” and “kift,” people generally hear “gift” because it’s a familiar word.
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Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities
The Lithuanian EU Presidency’s Conference “Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities” will be held September 23–24, 2013 at Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania. For more information visit horizons.mruni.eu/.
