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2013 APS Award Address: Helen J. Neville
In her William James Fellow Award Address, Neville describes findings from her team's basic research on neuroplasticity and also how those findings led them to develop and implement a training program for low socioeconomic-status families. Measures of parenting and, in 3- to 5-year-olds, cognition and event-related-potential measures of attention and language document large, significant, and enduring effects on neurocognitive function.
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Autism Symptoms Not Explained by Impaired Attention
Finding from a clinical study challenge the hypothesis that impaired attention might be at the root of autism symptoms.
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Status and Stress
The New York Times: Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills. What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects. That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences.
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Examining Personal Health Decisions
The Affordable Care Act aims to boost health at the population level by making healthcare affordable and accessible to all. But, even with greater access to healthcare, many aspects of health ultimately rest on individual-level decision making. Two new research articles published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore how people make health-related decisions, and how those decisions aren't always rational. The first article reveals people’s tendency to follow the status quo when making health-related decisions -- even when the status quo is objectively worse.
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Intent to Harm: Willful Acts Seem More Damaging
How harmful we perceive an act to be depends on whether we see the act as intentional, reveals new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The new research shows that people significantly overestimate the monetary cost of intentional harm, even when they are given a financial incentive to be accurate. “The law already recognizes intentional harm as more wrong than unintentional harm,” explain researchers Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske of Princeton University.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Perceived Aggressiveness Predicts Fighting Performance in Mixed-Martial-Arts Fighters Vít Třebický, Jan Havlíček, S. Craig Roberts, Anthony C. Little, and Karel Kleisner Past research has suggested that people can use facial cues to predict men's physical strength and fighting ability, but there is currently no direct evidence for this link. When participants rated pictures of mixed-martial-arts fighters for perceived aggressiveness and fighting ability, the researchers found that the perceived aggressiveness of fighters' faces was associated with the fighters' level of success in Ultimate Fighting Championship matches.
