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What Dropping 17,000 Wallets Around The Globe Can Teach Us About Honesty
So picture this: You're a receptionist at, say, a hotel. Someone walks in and says they found a lost wallet but they're in a hurry. They hand it to you. What would you do? And would that answer be different if it was empty or full of cash? Those are questions researchers have been exploring; Thursday, they published their findings in the journal Science. The experiment started small, with a research assistant in Finland turning in a few wallets with different amounts of money. He would walk up to the counter of a big public place, like a bank or a post office.
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A Rational Case for Following Your Emotions
In the popular American imagination, emotion and rationality are often mutually exclusive. One is erratic, unpredictable, and often a liability; the other, cool, collected, and absent obvious feeling. And even though research suggests that people experience emotions internally in similar ways no matter their gender, many Americans still regard emotion as uniquely feminine and weak. That myth has long ruled everything from the military to the white-collar workplace, and it has played a role in systemically excluding women from professional and cultural leadership. But dismissing the value of emotion is at odds with how human feelings actually work, both interpersonally and evolutionarily.
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Psychologist Finds 2 Easy Strategies to Beat the Stress of Waiting for News
The anxiety of waiting can be brutal. Whether you’re waiting on GRE scores, job application news, health test results, or any other weighty piece of life information, some strategies for coping are more effective than others. One powerful way to deal with that sense of anxious foreboding, scientists argued in a recent paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology, is to have your mind blown. According to research conducted by scientists at University of California-Riverside’s “Life Events” lab, one good way to deal anxiety-ridden waiting is to have an “awe experience.” Psychologist Katharine Sweeny, Ph.D. describes this as a moment that helps you lose yourself in the grandeur of life.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring depression and autobiographical memory, early response and sudden gains in a depression intervention, inflammatory proteins as predictors of change in depressive symptoms, and emotion displays and relationship formation in anxiety disorder.
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Contaminated Memories
I began exploring the intersection of memory and law after hearing the story of Penny Beerntsen, who was assaulted while running on a beach in 1985 — and who misidentified her assailant in the subsequent investigation. There’s a term for what she experienced: “memory contamination.” It’s when investigators influence an interview with a subject, resulting in inaccurate information. Moved by Ms. Beerntsen’s account as well as her openness about it, I wanted to help share her story more broadly. (Her case became well known when her misidentified assailant’s account was featured in the series “Making a Murderer;” the show does not include Ms.
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What’s So Funny? The Science of Why We Laugh
“How Many Psychologists Does It Take ... to Explain a Joke?” Many, it turns out. As psychologist Christian Jarrett noted in a 2013 article featuring that riddle as its title, scientists still struggle to explain exactly what makes people laugh. Indeed, the concept of humor is itself elusive. Although everyone understands intuitively what humor is, and dictionaries may define it simply as “the quality of being amusing,” it is difficult to define in a way that encompasses all its aspects.
