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Walk Like a Fish
The New York Times: NOBODY in their right mind visits Midtown Manhattan during the holidays. The reason is simple: everyone, it seems, is in Midtown Manhattan during the holidays. Drawn to the scene like lacewings to streetlights, tourists jam the sidewalks, the crowds slow-moving, veering, shopping-bag-laden, and only vaguely walking forward. New Yorkers normally roll their eyes, but they ought to take a closer look: watching these tourists interrupt the flow of traffic shows us how well pedestrians in our city usually move. This year I slowed down and observed them. The study of pedestrian movement took off with the urban sociologist William H.
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Reasoning Is Sharper in a Foreign Language
Scientific American Mind: The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue. To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when an impersonal decision (such as which vaccine to administer to a population) is presented in terms of a potential gain than when it is framed as a potential loss even when the outcomes are equivalent.
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Reappraisal Defuses Strong Emotional Responses to Israel-Palestine Conflict
Reappraisal is a widely-used cognitive strategy that can help people to regulate their reactions to emotionally charged events. Now, new research suggests that reappraisal may even be effective in changing people’s emotional responses in the context of one of the most intractable conflicts worldwide: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Negative intergroup emotions play a crucial role in decisions that perpetuate intractable conflicts,” observes lead researcher Eran Halperin of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel.
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Few Friends or Many: Which Is Best?
LiveScience: Whether one has a small, cozy group of friends or a larger, more boisterous gaggle may depend on individual personalities and circumstances, but new research suggests when deciding which type is best, socioeconomic conditions are key. "In the age of Facebook, many Americans seem to opt for a broad, shallow networking strategy," write Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia and Selin Kesebir of the London Business School last week in the journal Psychological Science.
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Newtown, Conn., Elementary School Shooting: Kids React Differently Than Adults
ABC: When even adults are left speechless by traumatic events, it's hard to imagine what's going on in the mind of a child. Adults often gorge on media images -- trying to glean facts, gain perspective, to make sense out of a senseless event. But for children, it can have the opposite effect. After the deadly rampage at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., psychologists and pediatricians are strongly urging parents to shield their school-age children from too much exposure to the news. ... "A number of children were traumatized who didn't have direct contact with 9/11, but rather watched the media extensively," said Dr.
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Neuroscientist Probes the Mind for Clues to End Conflicts
Scientific American Mind: Could neuroscience hold the key to breaking down psychological barriers between groups in conflict? In this month's issue of Scientific American, contributor Gareth Cook interviews Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about her work applying "theory of mind" to the discord between Palestinians and Israelis as well as conflicts between Arizonans who are Mexican immigrants and those who are U.S. citizens. Theory of mind is a concept used to describe the capacity to deduce what someone else is thinking or feeling.
