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Understanding Others
In order to effectively communicate with another person, we need to know something about his or her mental state: how they are feeling, what they are thinking, and what motivates them. Jason Mitchell is using brain imaging techniques to study how we function socially, an example of the growing field of social neuroscience. His research has clarified two characteristics of social cognition: first, that social thought is different from other types of thinking, and second, that one of the ways we understand the minds of others is by referring to our own mental state.
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Delayed Success
As part of his efforts to develop empirical tests to examine personality and to understand the mechanisms that enable self-control, Walter Mischel conducted a series of experiments known as the Stanford Marshmallow Tests. In the experiment, Mischel gave a child a choice between a single marshmallow, obtainable immediately, or two marshmallows obtainable by waiting for them. He found that children who were able to delay gratification and waited longer to get more marshmallows (or other treats), were later in life better adjusted, more dependable and able to tolerate frustration, and as high school students scored much higher on the collegiate Scholastic Aptitude Test.
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How Food Preferences Develop
Most kids refuse to eat their vegetables. Coming up with strategies to get kids to eat more of the green stuff is just one question Julie Mennella's lab is tackling. However, Mennella's research focus is not just on picky eaters. Her main research interests involve various components of food and taste preference, including how weve evolved to enjoy certain flavors over others. She investigates how we develop taste and flavor preferences. For example, she currently studies how a new mothers diet, via changes in amniotic fluid and breast milk, may affect a child's food preferences.
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Memory Shapes Future Scenarios
Kathleen McDermott’s recent work focuses on comparing the human abilities of remembering the past and envisioning specific future scenarios. Her research shows the neural substrates of these two actions to be interrelated, suggesting that envisioning the future may be impossible without a recollection of the past. Earlier work by McDermott included development of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, which demonstrates that when given a list of related words there is a high probability of one falsely remembering an unlisted associated word.
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Memory and Law
Elizabeth Loftus is an internationally recognized expert in the study of human memory, particularly the malleability of memories. Her extensive research shows that memory is highly susceptible to distortion and manipulation, and that people can vividly recall events that never happened. Loftus developed the “Lost in the Mall” technique, or Familial Informant Narrative Procedure, in which a study participant is told about a time the participant got lost in a shopping mall. Even though the event didn’t happen, a significant percentage of participants developed a false memory for the experience.
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Employee Goal Setting
Every employer wants to know the secret to employee motivation. Since the 1970s, Gary Latham has been investigating methods to boost employee performance. His primary interests lie in motivation, performance management, and training. Latham has also co-developed the theory of and conducted extensive research on goal setting, as well as ways employers can use goals to effectively increase job performance and job satisfaction. His studies have revealed that employees perform better when they are given specific, challenging goals compared to easy goals or no goals at all.
