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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.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Heart Rate Variability Moderates the Association Between Separation-Related Psychological Distress and Blood Pressure Reactivity Over Time Kyle J. Bourassa, Karen Hasselmo, and David A. Sbarra Divorce-related stress has been shown to negatively influence later health outcomes. To examine the mechanisms underlying this relationship, researchers measured the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; a measure of changes in heart rate during the respiratory cycle) and blood pressure of recently divorced or separated adults while they performed a stressful math task and a divorce-related mental-activation task.
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Children Learn to Take Turns for Mutual Gain
It takes children until they are about 5 years old to learn to take turns with others, while the social skill seems to elude chimpanzees, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings show that 5-year-old children adopted a turn-taking strategy more effectively than their younger counterparts, suggesting that the skill emerges as children’s cognitive abilities mature.
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For Teens, Learning That Personalities Change Buffers Against Stress
Teaching teens that social and personality traits can change helps them cope with social challenges such as bullying, which can help mitigate stress and improve academic performance.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Pupillary Contagion in Infancy: Evidence for Spontaneous Transfer of Arousal Christine Fawcett, Victoria Wesevich, and Gustaf Gredebäck Pupillary contagion -- when an individual's pupil size influences the pupil size of an observer -- is thought to be an automatic mechanism that facilitates prosocial responding and group cohesion. To explore whether the phenomenon might exist early in life, researchers examined the pupillary responses of 6- and 9-month-olds.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Missing-Phoneme Effect in Aural Prose Comprehension Jean Saint-Aubin, Raymond M. Klein, Mireille Babineau, John Christie, and David W. Gow, Jr. Studies repeatedly show that when people read text for comprehension while searching for a target letter, they miss a great number of the target letters that appear in function words such as "the" and "of." In this study, one group of native French speakers read two texts for comprehension while searching for a target letter; another group listened to a narration of the same two texts while listening for the target letter's corresponding phoneme.
