-
New Research on Memory From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on memory published in the November 2012 issue of Psychological Science. Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Predicts Failure to Recall Negative Autobiographical Memories Benjamin C. Storm and Tara A. Jobe Failure to retrieve memories may not always be a bad thing - we might, for example, prefer to forget about certain instances of heartbreak or failure in favor of some of the more positive events from our lives. In this study, Storm and Jobe asked participants to perform a memory task meant to assess retrieval-induced forgetting - when remembering one piece of information leads to forgetting other information.
-
23rd Annual Neuroscience Conference
Baycrest presents the 23rd Annual Neuroscience Conference Brain Plasticity and Neurorehabilitation March 4-6, 2013 Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, Toronto ON Canada. Details at http://research.baycrest.org/conference
-
Exploring the Financial Costs of Sadness
Your emotions can certainly impact your decisions, but you might be surprised by the extent to which your emotions affect your pocketbook. New research from psychological scientist Jennifer Lerner of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and colleagues Ye Li and Elke U. Weber of Columbia University explores how impatience brought on by sadness can in turn produce substantial financial loss. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
-
Everyone Judges Sexy Women — but Why?
“Are sexualized women seen as complete human beings?” — and if not, why? A group of psychological scientists led by Jeroen Vaes of the University of Padova, Italy, tried to answer these questions by studying volunteers’ reactions to photographs. They found that both men and women tend to view sexually objectified women as having characteristics that are “less than human”; however, they also found that men and women dehumanize sexualized women for very different reasons. The results were published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Vaes and his colleagues recruited heterosexual male and female study participants at an Italian university.
-
The Road to Language Learning Is Iconic
Languages are highly complex systems and yet most children seem to acquire language easily, even in the absence of formal instruction. New research on young children’s use of British Sign Language (BSL) sheds light on one mechanism - iconicity - that may play an important role in children's ability to learn language. For spoken and written language, the arbitrary relationship between a word’s form – how it sounds or how it looks on paper – and its meaning is a particularly challenging feature of language acquisition. But one of the first things people notice about sign languages is that signs often represent aspects of meaning in their form.
-
New Research On Visual Perception From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on visual perception from Psychological Science. Inattention Abolishes Binocular Rivalry: Perceptual Evidence Jan W. Brascamp and Randolph Blake Binocular rivalry occurs when a different image is shown to each eye and instead of seeing one image, the viewer shifts between the two images. In this study, researchers examined the effects of attention on binocular rivalry by presenting participants with visually different stimuli in each eye.
