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People who play violent video games less affected by distressing images, study shows
People who frequently play violent video games are less affected by violent or distressing images, a new study has found. The research from the University of New South Wales did not find that video game players were more violent or aggressive, but that violent images had less of an effect in distracting their vision when they were searching for something else. In the experiment, people were shown 17 images of neutral landscapes in a quick flashing sequence. They were told to try and pick out one image that had been rotated sideways and remember which direction it was rotated.
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Giving, Rather Than Receiving, Leads To Lasting Happiness: Study
New U.S. research has found that we may get longer-lasting happiness by giving to others, rather than receiving for ourselves. Carried out by psychologists from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, the new research involved a series of experiments to see which brought the longest-lasting joy — giving a gift to yourself or to others. In one of the experiments, 96 participants received $5 every day for five days and were randomly assigned to spend the money on themselves or on someone else.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring how we track other people’s knowledge states, individual differences in face recognition, and self-other agreement in personality reports.
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What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college junior cry: His girlfriend had dumped him; he had been accused of plagiarism. “I just got my first A-minus,” he said, his voice shaking. Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A’s. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers. I was one of them.
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3 in 4 Americans Struggle With Loneliness
Folks feeling lonely as the holidays approach have a lot of company, a new study suggests. Loneliness appears to be widespread among Americans, affecting three out of every four people, researchers have found. Further, loneliness appears to spike at specific times during adulthood. Your late 20s, mid-50s and late 80s are times when you are most at risk of feeling lonely. --- Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience with Brigham Young University in Utah.
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Always Forgetting Important Things? Here’s How to Fix That, According to Science
Most people, when tasked with remembering something important, jot down a note. But a study published recently in the journal Experimental Aging Research says there may be a better way to keep memories fresh: draw a picture. Drawing works your brain in ways that writing alone does not, forcing it to process visual information, translate the meaning of a word into an image and carry out a physical act all at once, says study co-author Melissa Meade, a doctoral candidate in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “It’s bringing online a lot of different brain regions that you wouldn’t bring online if you were just writing information out,” Meade explains.
