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Selective Media Coverage May Cause Us to Forget Certain Health Facts
The health facts presented by mass media in the midst of a disease outbreak are likely to influence what we remember about the disease -- new research suggests that the same mass media coverage may also influence the facts that we forget. The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicate that personal anxiety and mass media coverage interact to determine what people remember about a disease. “The starting point for our study was the exaggerated coverage of Ebola in 2014 despite the absence of any serious consequences in the United States,” says psychological scientist Alin Coman of Princeton University.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: On Race and Time Gordon B. Moskowitz, Irmak Olcaysoy Okten, and Cynthia M. Gooch People who show high external motivation to control prejudice (EMCP) feel threatened by the possibility that they may be viewed as biased. This threat causes people high in EMCP to feel increased arousal and anxiety in intergroup situations. The researchers were interested to know whether people concerned with appearing biased experience time-perception distortions in intergroup situations, given that arousal has been shown to influence the perception of time.
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Older Beats Younger When It Comes to Correcting Mistakes
Findings from a new study challenge the notion that older adults always lag behind their younger counterparts when it comes to learning new things. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that older adults were actually better than young adults at correcting their mistakes on a general information quiz. “The take home message is that there are some things that older adults can learn extremely well, even better than young adults. Correcting their factual errors—all of their errors—is one of them,” say psychological scientists Janet Metcalfe and David Friedman of Columbia University, who conducted the study.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Rethinking Suicide Surveillance: Google Search Data and Self-Reported Suicidality Differentially Estimate Completed Suicide Risk Christine Ma-Kellams, Flora Or, Ji Hyun Baek, and Ichiro Kawachi Google search information is increasingly used by researchers to study public health behavior, but how do data collected from Google compare with more traditional measures of health? The researchers analyzed suicide-related search terms entered into Google between 2008 and 2009 from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, comparing them with questions related to suicidal thoughts and behaviors taken from the U.S.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Conceptual Conditioning: Mechanisms Mediating Conditioning Effects on Pain Marieke Jepma and Tor D. Wager Although researchers know that classical conditioning can modify pain responses, the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Participants were conditioned to pair specific shapes with symbolic indicators of a high or low temperature. Participants' skin conductance responses were then measured as they completed a test phase in which the shapes preceded contact heat treatments.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Unhappy Triad: Pain, Sleep Complaints, and Internalizing Symptoms Erin Koffel, Erin E. Krebs, Paul A. Arbisi, Christopher R. Erbes, and Melissa A. Polusny Chronic pain, sleep complaints, and anxiety/depression are three significant sources of distress that incur great personal and societal costs. Two competing theories describing the relationships among these factors suggest that internalizing symptoms mediate the relationship between sleep complaints and pain or that pain mediates the relationship between sleep complaints and internalizing symptoms.
