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HOW TWO TRAILBLAZING PSYCHOLOGISTS TURNED THE WORLD OF DECISION SCIENCE UPSIDE DOWN
Vanity Fair: The dozen or so graduate students in Danny Kahneman’s seminar at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, were all surprised when, in the spring of 1969, Amos Tversky turned up. Danny never had guests: The seminar, called Applications of Psychology, was his show. Amos’s interests were about as far removed from the real-world problems in Applications of Psychology as a psychologist’s could be. Amos himself seemed about as far removed from Danny as he could be. Danny had spent years of his childhood hiding in barns and chicken coops in France, from the Nazis who hunted him.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Vicissitudes of Positive Autobiographical Recollection as an Emotion Regulation Strategy in Depression Aliza Werner-Seidler, Laura Tan, and Tim Dalgleish In this study, the authors examined whether the concordance or discrepancy of a memory with the person's current self impacts the effect of that memory on mood. Depressed and never-depressed British participants rated their mood; never-depressed participants then watched a video designed to induce a sad mood, whereas depressed participants watched a neutral movie.
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Psychologists argue about whether smiling makes cartoons funnier
Nature: A large, multi-lab replication study has found no evidence to validate one of psychology’s textbook findings: the idea that people find cartoons funnier if they are surreptitiously induced to smile. But an author of the original report — published nearly three decades ago — says that the new analysis has shortcomings, and may not represent a direct replication of his work. In 1988, Fritz Strack, a psychologist now at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and colleagues found that people who held a pen between their teeth, which induces a smile, rated cartoons as funnier than did those who held a pen between their lips, which induced a pout, or frown1.
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Grammar school entrance exams undermined by study showing how children learn
Independent: A new psychological study has cast doubt both on the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and claims that entrance exams for selective schools can accurately determine a child’s “true potential”. ... They also found a greater effect of training on older adolescents than on their younger counterparts, according to a paper in the journal Psychological Science.
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This might be why depression is rising among teen girls
CNN: There has been a significant climb in the prevalence of major depression among adolescents and young adults in recent years -- and the troubling trend may be strongest in teenage girls, according to a new study. However, the number of adolescents receiving treatment does not appear to follow that same trend, suggests the study, published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday. "Although a recent federal task force recommended screening for depression in young people 12 to 18 years of age, screening is far from universal," said Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and a co-author of the study.
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Car Talk: Contentious Conversations Drive Distraction
Engaging in a heated, emotional discussion with a passenger can turn into a dangerous distraction for drivers.
