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To Savor the Flavor, Perform a Short Ritual First
Birthday celebrations often follow a formula, including off-key singing, making a birthday wish while blowing out candles, and the ceremonial cutting of the birthday cake. New research suggests that this ritual not only makes the
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Society for Affective Science Inaugural Conference
A new society has been formed -- The Society for Affective Science. Its mission is to foster basic and applied research in the variety of fields that study affect, broadly defined. The SAS inaugural conference will be April 24-26, 2014 in Washington DC. This will be a theoretically/methodologically diverse, student-friendly conference that will provide a forum for cross-cutting work in emotion, stress, and many of the other topics that fall under the broad umbrella of affective science. For more information, and to get early-bird registration rates, see the society website: society-for-affective-science.org. For questions, contact [email protected].
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Increased Meta-Perceptions of Agreeableness and Extraversion Predict Partner Satisfaction
Meta-perceptions are defined as judgments made by the self about what others think about the self. There are certain areas of personality research that may benefit from the use of meta-perceptions in addition to self- or informant-perceptions. This research predicted partner satisfaction from meta-perceptions of personality provided by a representative community sample of 325 romantic couples from St. Louis, Missouri.
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How To Fight Racial Bias When It’s Silent And Subtle
NPR: In the popular imagination and in conventional discourse -- especially in the context of highly charged news events such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin -- prejudice is all about hatred and animosity. Scientists agree there's little doubt that hate-filled racism is real, but a growing body of social science research suggests that racial disparities and other biased outcomes in the criminal justice system, in medicine and in professional settings can be explained by unconscious attitudes and stereotypes. Subtle biases are linked to police cadets being more likely to shoot unarmed black men than they are unarmed white men.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Time in Perspective Andrei Gorea and Janice Hau Researchers know that the perceived size of an object increases as its perceived distance from an observer increases (Emmert's law) and that the perceived time interval between two consecutively occurring stimuli increases when the distance between them is greater (Kappa effect). What happens when these two perceptual phenomena are induced together? The researchers found that people overestimated the perceived duration of objects moving in a distant plane relative to the perceived duration of the same objects moving in a closer plane.
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Oxytocin May Reduce Anxiety Related to Social Threats, But Only for Some
Oxytocin — a hormone thought to promote trust and empathy — has been considered as a possible tool for the treatment of social anxiety. But research suggests that the effects of oxytocin promote prosocial behaviors only in people with low social anxiety.
