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Toddlers Copy Their Peers to Fit In, but Apes Don’t
From the playground to the board room, people often follow, or conform, to the behavior of those around them as a way of fitting in. New research shows that this behavioral conformity appears early in human children, but isn’t evidenced by apes like chimpanzees and orangutans. “Conformity is a very basic feature of human sociality. It retains in- and out-groups, it helps groups coordinate and it stabilizes cultural diversity, one of the hallmark characteristics of the human species,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Jena.
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Depressed People Believe that Life Gets Better
Adults typically believe that life gets better — today is better than yesterday was and tomorrow will be even better than today. A new study shows that even depressed individuals believe in a brighter future, but this optimistic belief may not lead to better outcomes. The findings are published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Brain Activity Provides Evidence for Internal “Calorie Counter”
As you glance over a menu or peruse the shelves in a supermarket, you may be thinking about how each food will taste and whether it’s nutritious, or you may be trying to decide what
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Social-Network Complexity in Humans Is Associated With the Neural Response to Social Information Sarah L. Dziura and James C. Thompson Research has suggested that with an increase in the complexity of humans' social groups comes a corresponding enhancement of the brain areas involved in social processing. Participants viewed point-light arrays displaying biological or scrambled motion while they were being scanned in an fMRI machine. Participants also completed a social network index that assessed the complexity of their social network.
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Positive Implicit Messages May Improve Older Adults’ Physical Functioning
Older adults who were exposed to positive stereotypes about aging without being aware of it showed improved physical functioning that lasted up to several weeks, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers led by psychological scientist Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health used a novel intervention method to examine whether exposure to positive age stereotypes could weaken negative age stereotypes and their effects over time, and lead to healthier outcomes.
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Teens’ Science Interest Linked With Knowledge, but Only in Wealthier Nations
It seems logical that a student who is interested in science as an academic subject would also know a lot about science, but new findings show that this link depends on the overall wealth of the country that the teen calls home. The research suggests that individual science achievement may be influenced as much by broad national-level resources as it is by personal interest and motivation.