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The Presumptuous Power Holder
Louis XIV, the vain French king who held the longest reign in European history, epitomized absolute monarchy. But his blind pursuit of power—highlighted by the four wars he waged —left the French people demoralized and the treasury bankrupt. The self-proclaimed Sun King fully expected others to sacrifice and suffer to satisfy his own ambitions. Psychological scientists Jennifer Overbeck and Vitaliya Droutman point to Louis XIV as an extreme example of power holders who pursue their goals without considering or understanding the desires of the people they represent.
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“Seeing” Faces Through Touch
Our sense of touch can contribute to our ability to perceive faces, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “In daily life, we usually recognize faces through sight and almost never explore them through touch,” says lead researcher Kazumichi Matsumiya of Tohoku University in Japan.
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Get Off the Work Treadmill
Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, likens today’s work environment to running on a treadmill. People race to keep up with meetings, emails, and deadlines, while making no real progress – especially on creative tasks. Instead, it often would be better to do less, says Amabile, an APS Fellow. The single most important thing managers can do to enhance workplace creativity is “protecting at least 30 to 60 minutes each day for yourself and your people that’s devoted to quiet reflection,” she tells the Harvard Gazette. Amabile has spent the last 35 years researching life inside organizations and how it influences employees and their performance.
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Fear of Holes May Stem From Evolutionary Survival Response
For those with trypophobia, the sight of clusters of holes in various formations can cause intensely unpleasant visceral reactions.
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Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT)
Get involved in the development of a new reporting guideline for social and psychological interventions! An international initiative of researchers, journal editors, and stakeholders in intervention studies is working with the Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Group to develop CONSORT-SPI: an official Extension for Social and Psychological Interventions. We are currently looking for participants for an upcoming Delphi process (starting mid-September 2013) to generate possible reporting standards for the guideline. Stakeholders involved in researching, publishing, funding, commissioning, or providing these interventions are invited to contact us to participate.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Relative Trustworthiness of Inferential Tests of the Indirect Effect in Statistical Mediation Analysis: Does Method Really Matter? Andrew F. Hayes and Michael Scharkow Mediation analysis is commonly used to examine the indirect effect of one variable (X) on a second variable (Y) through a mediator variable (M). Although many researchers conduct mediation analysis, not all do so in the same way. The authors examined the delta method, percentile and bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs), the distribution-of-the-product approach, the Monte Carlo CI, and the test of joint significance.
