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Testing Can Be Useful for Students and Teachers, Promoting Long-Term Learning
Pop quiz! Tests are good for: (a) Assessing what you’ve learned; (b) Learning new information; (c) a & b; (d) None of the above. The correct answer? According to research from psychological science, it’s both (a) and (b) – while testing can be useful as an assessment tool, the actual process of taking a test can also help us to learn and retain new information over the long term and apply it across different contexts. New research published in journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores the nuanced interactions between testing, memory, and learning and suggests possible applications for testing in educational settings.
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Building Emotions
Emotions like anger, sadness, and fear have traditionally been thought of as innate, discrete entities, each with its own biological core: An event (seeing a snake) triggers a particular hardwired emotion (fear) and its corresponding behavioral and physiological responses (an adrenaline surge, screaming, running away). As Lisa Feldman Barrett has found, however, this view is not well supported by the scientific literature, and so she has developed a model that is more in line with the data.
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Can You Trust Nexi?
People face this predicament all the time—can you determine a person’s character in a single interaction? Can you judge whether someone you just met can be trusted when you have only a few minutes together? And if you can, how do you do it? Using a robot named Nexi, Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno and collaborators Cynthia Breazeal from MIT’s Media Lab and Robert Frank and David Pizarro from Cornell University have figured out the answer. The findings will be published in the journal Psychological Science.
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Därför skrattar vi åt hemska saker (That’s why we laugh at terrible things)
Sveriges Television: Humorns beståndsdelar Kan man skämta om vad som helst? Den frågan har komiker ställt sig i alla tider. Nu visar ny forskning att det funkar att gå över gränsen. Men bara lite. Komikern Özz Nujen vet hur det känns att ta ett skämt för långt. - Det har jag gjort tusentals gånger. Men det värsta var nog när jag skämtade om elfte september i New York. Jag berättade att en av mina släktingar dog i attacken. När jag sen sa att det var han som körde planet då blev det knäpptyst. - Och mitt skämt om att man inte direkt ställde sig upp och gjorde vågen efter tsunamikatastrofen gick inte heller hem hos alla.
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The Unexpected Impact of Coded Appeals
The New York Times: After signing into law the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously told an aide, “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Indeed, the Johnson-Goldwater contest was notable in two important respects related to race: it featured the first appearance in almost a century of racial animus as a central dimension of partisan conflict in a presidential election, and it was the last time a Democrat received a majority of the white vote. Attention to matters of race has surged in recent weeks with the appearance of a pair of purportedly race-coded ads.
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Psycho-Trick fördert gesundes Verhalten (Psychological trick promotes healthy behavior)
Der Spiegel: Salat? Oder doch Currywurst und Pommes? Die Wahl des Mittagsessens kann durch einen Kniff überraschenderweise beeinflusst werden. Möglich wird das durch ein grundlegendes psychologisches Konzept - nämlich, wie stark Menschen Körper und Geist als getrennt voneinander wahrnehmen. "Der Geist ist willig, aber das Fleisch ist schwach." Der aus der Bibel stammende Satz ist eines von vielen Beispielen dafür, dass Menschen Geist und Körper als auf gewisse Weise voneinander getrennt wahrnehmen. Das ist auch eine Voraussetzung dafür, an ein Leben nach dem Tod oder etwa an Reinkarnation zu glauben - dies ist ja nur möglich, wenn der Geist das Ende des Körpers überdauert.
