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Personal Judgments Are Swayed by Group Opinion, but Only for 3 Days
We all want to feel like we’re free-thinking individuals, but there’s nothing like the power of social pressure to sway an opinion. New research suggests that people do change their own personal judgments so that they fall in line with the group norm, but the change only seems to last about 3 days. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our findings suggest that exposure to others' opinions does indeed change our own private opinions -- but it doesn’t change them forever,” says psychological scientist and study author Rongjun Yu of South China Normal University.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Orthographic Coding in Illiterates and Literates Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Karla Orihuela, and Manuel Carreiras Does literacy shape the way letter strings are visually processed? Literate and illiterate adults performed perceptual matching tasks in which they indicated whether a target string of symbols was the same or different from a previously presented reference string of symbols. "Different" character strings were created by changing the position of characters (transposed-characters condition) or by replacing one character in the string with a new character (replaced-characters condition).
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Mothers’ Symptoms of Depression Predict How They Respond to Child Behavior
Depressive symptoms seem to focus mothers' responses on minimizing their own distress, which may come at the expense of focusing on the impact their responses have on their children, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Depressive symptoms are common among mothers, and these symptoms are linked with worse developmental outcomes for children. The new study, which followed 319 mothers and their children over a two-year period, helps to explain why parenting competence seems to deteriorate as parents' symptoms of depression increase.
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Relationship Satisfaction Linked with Changing Use of Contraception
Women’s sexual satisfaction in long-term heterosexual relationships may be influenced by changes in hormonal contraceptive use, research from the University of Stirling shows. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, was carried out by researchers from the universities of Stirling, Glasgow, Newcastle, Northumbria and Charles University in Prague. The team looked at a sample of 365 couples, and investigated how satisfaction levels — in both sexual and non-sexual aspects of long-term relationships — were influenced by women’s current and historical use of hormonal contraception.
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Get It Over With: People Choose More Difficult Tasks to Get Jobs Done More Quickly
Most of us are well-acquainted with procrastination, but new research suggests that “pre-crastination”—hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible—may also be a common phenomenon.
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Forgiving a Wrong May Actually Make It Easier to Forget
We’re often told to “forgive and forget” the wrongs that we suffer -- it turns out that there may be some scientific truth behind the common saying. A study from researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland shows that the details of a transgression are more susceptible to forgetting when that transgression has been forgiven. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “It is well established that learning to forgive others can have positive benefits for an individual’s physical and mental health,” says Saima Noreen, lead author of the study.