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New Research From Psychological Science
A Functional Role for the Motor System in Language Understanding: Evidence From Theta-Burst Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Roel M. Willems, Ludovica Labruna, Mark D’Esposito, Richard Ivry, and Daniel Casasanto Previous studies have revealed that motor areas of the brain can be activated when people read or listen to action words. To determine whether motor areas are necessary for language comprehension, researchers used theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation to stimulate an area in either the left or the right premotor cortex.
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Want to make friends? Imitate them . . . just don’t talk finances
What is a little money between friends? According to new research, at the very least, it's not going to stimulate bonding. Researchers have longknown mimicry strengthens social bonding between strangers. By subtly imitating a person's posture or gestures, you can create goodwill. But a new study looking at the psychological effects of money on our behaviour suggests this does not apply when money is involved. The Montreal Gazette: Mimic someone and he'll feel a warm glow; but mimic someone while he's being reminded of money and he'll feel threatened.
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Harry Potter And The Well Of Medical Research
Los Angeles Times: Who knew the world of Harry Potter was such a rich source of material for medical researchers? For more than a decade, the phenomenally popular series has provided grist for studies on topics ranging from genetics to social cognition to autism. PubMed, an online database of medical studies, lists 30 studies that invoke the young wizard — "Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele," "Harry Potter and the Structural Biologist's (Key)stone," even "Harry Potter Casts a Spell on Accident-Prone Children." That last study found that children's emergency department visits decreased significantly when new Harry Potter books went on sale.
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Share the love! Being aroused makes you more likely to send information to other people, study finds
Couriermail.com.au: Dear reader, You're an idiot. And you smell bad. And nobody likes you. And, according to one professor, you're more likely to share this story with your friends if you took those insults to heart. A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that being aroused makes people more likely to share information with others. "Being aroused", in this context, just means any state of agitation, either positive or negative, such as being angry, anxious or amused — anything that gets your pulse up.
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Nice girls finish last; ‘queen bees’ get paid
Central Florida Future: According to the U.S. Department of Education, despite having earned higher college GPAs in every subject, young women will take home, on average across all professions, just 80 percent of what their male colleagues do. What's worse is that a Harvard study found that women who demand higher starting salaries are perceived as "less nice," and thus are less likely to be hired. I cannot believe that, in 2011, women are still judged on how well they can play the nice girl role in order to be hired. The problem is that once you have the job, the nice girl role will not necessarily get you promoted.
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Is TV Teaching Kids to Value Fame Above All?
TIME: Is fame more important to tweens than it used to be? A new study suggests that young kids of this decade are vastly more familiar with and are more likely to value individualistic personality traits like fame, achievement and wealth than kids of past eras — way back before the term "tween" was even invented — largely because of popular TV shows and other types of media. The study, which was done by Yalda Uhls and Patricia Greenfield of the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the content of the two most popular TV shows with kids aged 9 to 11 once a decade from 1967 to 2007.
