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Diversifying Science to Represent Diverse Populations
Despite increasing attention to issues of diversity in scientific research, participant populations in behavioral science tend to be relatively homogeneous. Understanding how people differ across various dimensions, and how those differences are driven by underlying psychological, biological, and social processes, is critical to building a rigorous and comprehensive clinical science. A special series in Clinical Psychological Science highlights the importance of broadening the traditional scope of clinical science research, advancing the field so that it can adequately address the needs and concerns of diverse populations.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: A Safe Haven: Investigating Social-Support Figures as Prepared Safety Stimuli Erica A. Hornstein, Michael S. Fanselow, and Naomi I. Eisenberger Research has shown that fear learning occurs more readily with certain stimuli such as snakes and spiders, perhaps because these types of stimuli have historically threatened humans' survival. Although fear conditioning to these prepared fear stimuli has been examined, little research has studied their parallels -- prepared safety stimuli (i.e., stimuli that have historically benefited survival).
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Playing Action Video Games Boosts Visual Motor Skill Underlying Driving
Playing action-based video games may boost players’ ability to coordinate incoming visual information with their motor control, a skill critical to many real-world behaviors including driving, new research shows. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our research shows that playing easily accessible action video games for as little as 5 hours can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” says researcher Li Li of New York University Shanghai, lead author on the study.
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Building Public Trust in the Police
A comprehensive report examines the psychological research on the factors that drive public trust and law-related behavior.
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Do Monkeys Know When They Don’t Know Something?
Are humans the only animal that knows what they don’t know? A study by researchers at Yale and Harvard shows that rhesus monkeys also spontaneously recognize when they are ignorant and need to seek out more information. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Metacognition— the ability to think about our own thoughts— has long been considered a hallmark of being human,” said Laurie Santos, Yale psychological scientist and senior author of the study. “We all know the difference between feeling like we know something for sure and feeling like we’re not all that certain.
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How We Explain Things Shapes What We Think Is Right
New research focuses on a fundamental human habit: When trying to explain something (why people give roses for Valentine’s Day, for example), we often focus on the traits of the thing itself (roses are pretty) and not its context (advertisers promote roses). In a new study, researchers found that people who tend to focus on “inherent traits” and ignore context also are more likely to assume that the patterns they see around them are good. The findings are forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
