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When The Brain Decides
Every day we have to make decisions that involve evaluating or choosing between options, often without much information to go on. So how we do it? How do we prevent analysis paralysis? Psychological theory suggests that we often rely on the recognition heuristic, choosing the option that we recognize over the one we don’t. So, as psychological scientist Christian Frings points out, if we have to predict whether Roger Federer or Michael Berrer will win a tennis match, we’ll probably stick with Federer because he’s a well-known name.
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Pursuing Non-Conscious Goals
You’re at dinner with your date’s family and you’re already feeling slightly nervous, anxious and wondering what type of an impression you will make. All of a sudden, your date’s little nephew comes running up to you and hands you bits of food from his mouth. How disgusted would you feel? In a new article to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, authors Ran Hassin and Daniella Shidlovski from The Hebrew University suggest that if you subconsciously want to impress the family, and taking the food would help you do so, you will be less disgusted than if you didn’t have such non-conscious motivation.
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Goalkeepers of losing teams dive to right, study says
BBC News: A study of penalty shoot-outs in World Cup matches from 1982 to 2010 showed keepers usually had an even chance of going left or right to defend the goal. But the higher pressure of a losing position pushed them more to the right. The study, to be published in Psychological Science, suggests humans' "right-oriented" brains are to blame. Read more: BBC News
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Toys May Shape Language Development
Yahoo News: Toddlers who play with different-shaped objects learn new words twice as fast as those who play with objects that have similar shapes, a new study finds. University of Iowa researchers worked with 16 children who were 18 months old and knew about 17 object names at the start of the study. Some children were taught the names of objects by playing with toys that were nearly identical, while others played with toys that were significantly different. Read more: Yahoo News
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Het geheim achter voetbalpenalty’s
Metro Nederland: Links of rechts duiken? Dat is de grote vraag en het keuzemoment van keepers als er strafschoppen worden genomen. Maar nu beweert een groep Nederlandse psychologen dat ze een antwoord hebben op deze eeuwige vraag. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat keepers de neiging hebben om in de rechterhoek te duiken wanneer hun team aan de verliezende hand is tijdens een Wereldkampioenschap. De resultaten hiervan worden gepubliceerd in Psychological Science, een belangrijk tijdschrift in de psychologie. Lees meer/Read more: Metro Nederland
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Harry Potter and the well of medical research
The Spec: HARTFORD, CONN. Who knew the world of Harry Potter was such a rich source of material for medical researchers? For more than a decade, the stories of the phenomenally popular series have played a role in studies on everything from genetics to social cognition to autism. PubMed, an online database of medical studies, lists 30 studies that invoke the young wizard. A few examples: Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele, Harry Potter and the Structural Biologist’s (Key)stone, and Harry Potter Casts a Spell on Accident-Prone Children. This last study found that emergency department visits among children decreased significantly when new Harry Potter books went on sale.
