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New Research From Psychological Science
Controlling the Unconscious: Attentional Task Sets Modulate Subliminal Semantic and Visuomotor Processes Differentially Ulla Martens, Ulrich Ansorge, and Markus Kiefer Unconscious processing can be affected by how a person's attention is focused. Researchers gave volunteers a semantic induction task (i.e., classifying an object as living or nonliving) or a perceptual induction task (i.e., classifying an object as round or elongated) to engage their attention in different ways.
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Why Having Kids Is Foolish
TIME: All parents know that having kids is a blessing — except when it's a nightmare of screaming fits, diapers, runny noses, wars over bedtimes and homework and clothes. To say nothing of bills too numerous to list. Economists have argued in the past that having kids is an economically silly investment; after all, it's cheaper to hire end-of-life care than to raise a child. Now comes new research showing that having kids is not only financially foolish but that kids literally make parents delusional. Researchers have known for some time that parents with minors who live at home report feeling calm significantly less often than than people who don't live with young children.
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Joy of parenthood is a fantasy: Psychologists say cost of children forces mothers and fathers to convince themselves it’s worthwhile
The Daily Mail: Most parents say they wouldn’t have it any other way. Children cause them financial hardship, eat up their time and cause untold worry... but mums and dads insist they are worth every penny, wrinkle and grey hair. But according to scientists, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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We make better decisions when we gotta go
MSNBC: In addition to making you walk funny and drop your keys five or six times while trying to get inside your house, a full bladder may actually do something useful: help you make better decisions. According to an upcoming study in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands performed experiments on more than 500 college students to determine if the inhibitory signals sent to a full bladder would “spill over” into other inhibitory responses, such as holding out for a larger monetary reward rather than going with a smaller immediate one. Read the whole story: MSNBC
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Mate Idealization Makes for Happy Early Marriage
Scientific American: They say that love is blind. And that’s probably for the best. Because a new study shows that people who greatly idealize their spouses have the happiest marriages. For the first few years, anyway. The research appears in the journal Psychological Science. [Sandra Murray et al., "Tempting Fate or Inviting Happiness?: Unrealistic Idealization Prevents the Decline of Marital Satisfaction," link to come] Most people mentally accentuate their partners’ better qualities. At least during courtship. If we didn’t, who would ever tie the knot? But some folks take these fantasies to cartoonish extremes.
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Slamming the fridge: Trumping the booze bias
Imagine you’re at an informal social gathering, and you wander into the kitchen in search of a cold Coke. You open the refrigerator, but there are no soft drinks to be found. Instead, you face a fridge packed with cases of beer and icy quarts of vodka. How do you react? Well, if you’re like most people, you think, “Damn. No Coke,” and look elsewhere or forget it. But if you’re an alcoholic, your reaction—your rapid, visceral reaction—would likely be quite different. You’d be drawn in. Your memory would instantly call up past associations with liquor, and you might even feel a craving—even if you haven’t had a drink in a long time.
