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Social Networking in a Graduate Industrial/Organizational Program
While social networks proliferate, insight is lacking about how graduate students, faculty, and administration collaboratively engage such networks. In early 2011, University of Phoenix rolled out what has become the world’s largest, single institution, educational social networking site, PhoenixConnect. The authors examined graduate student, faculty, and administrator contributions and interactions within this university social network. Participants from the graduate program in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology were given qualitative interviews during bimonthly face-to-face classes to investigate the ways participants from different cohorts used social networking.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Temporary Deafness Can Impair Multisensory Integration: A Study of Cochlear-Implant Users Simon P. Landry, Jean-Paul Guillemot, and François Champoux Does temporary deafness in adults disrupt other multisensory processes? Participants who had or had not experienced a period of deafness performed a nonspeech task meant to illicit an audiotactile illusion. Participants without a history of hearing loss experienced the audiotactile illusion, whereas those with restored hearing did not. This suggests that the maintenance of audiotactile processes might require an uninterrupted bond between the two modalities.
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Emotional Cues Alter Perceptions of Time and Number
Emotionally charged information dilates our perception of time and interferes with our numerical intuition, though it does so in different ways. Previous findings on how we process time and numbers have been mixed -- some studies propose a common mechanism, while others suggest that the two domains are distinct. Psychological scientists Laura Young and Sara Cordes of Boston College sought to further investigate this issue by having 38 participants observe emotionally charged stimuli -- in this case, angry, happy, or neutral faces -- and then estimate either the number of dots that appeared or the amount of time that an oval was shown on a screen.
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From the Mouths of Babes and Birds
The New York Times: Babies learn to speak months after they begin to understand language. As they are learning to talk, they babble, repeating the same syllable (“da-da-da”) or combining syllables into a string (“da-do-da-do”). But when babies babble, what are they actually doing? And why does it take them so long to begin speaking? Insights into these mysteries of human language acquisition are now coming from a surprising source: songbirds.
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Why Healthy Eaters Fall for Fries
The New York Times: LAST Tuesday, Connor Moran, a limit-the-red-meat, increase-the-greens, eat-salad-for-lunch kind of guy, stopped into a Bronx Dunkin’ Donuts for his usual black coffee, no sugar, no cream. He walked out with a sandwich of egg and bacon between two halves of a glazed doughnut. Such is the puzzle of the food industry: American consumers, even otherwise healthy ones, keep choosing caloric indulgences rather than healthy foods at fast-food restaurants. Public health officials have been pushing fast-food restaurants to offer more nutritious foods to help combat excess weight in the United States, where more than one-third of American adults are obese.
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Teens’ Self-Consciousness Linked With Specific Brain, Physiological Responses
Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge in adolescence. “Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.
