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Money May Corrupt, but Thinking About Time Can Strengthen Morality
Experimenters have found that implicitly activating the concept of time seems to reduce cheating behavior by encouraging people to engage in self-reflection.
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No Pictures, Please: Taking Photos May Impede Memory of Museum Tour
Visit a museum these days and you’ll see people using their smartphones and cameras to take pictures of works of art, archeological finds, historical artifacts, and any other object that strikes their fancy. While taking a picture might seem like a good way to preserve the moment, new research suggests that museum-goers may want to put their cameras down. In a new study, psychological scientist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University presents data showing that participants had worse memory for objects, and for specific object details, when they took photos of them. The findings are published 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: Below-Baseline Suppression of Competitors During Interference Resolution by Younger but Not Older Adults M. Karl Healey, K. W. Joan Ngo, and Lynn Hasher Researchers have argued that successful retrieval of a memory requires suppression of competing information. The authors examined the suppression abilities of older and younger adults using a novel paradigm that allowed them to study below-baseline suppression, which is considered a hallmark of true suppression effects.
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Stress, Poverty, and Ethnicity Linked Among Young Parents
An avalanche of chronic stress — driven by concerns ranging from parenting to discrimination — disproportionately affects poor mothers and fathers, according to the first results from a comprehensive multi-state study. "Those who are poor have much higher stress than those who are not. In fact, being poor was associated with more of almost every kind of stress," said lead researcher Chris Dunkel Schetter, a professor of psychology in UCLA's College of Letters and Science. The report found that although people with higher incomes have lower levels of stress overall, stress levels aren't reduced as much for higher-income African-Americans as they are for higher-income whites.
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Women Find Sexually Explicit Ads Unappealing — Unless the Price Is Right
Sexual imagery is often used in magazine and TV ads, presumably to help entice buyers to purchase a new product. But new research suggests that women tend to find ads with sexual imagery off-putting, unless the advertised item is priced high enough. The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that women’s otherwise negative attitudes about sexual imagery can be softened when the images are paired with a product that connotes high worth.
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Our Pupils Adjust as We Imagine Bright and Dark Scenes
Conjuring up a visual image in the mind -- like a sunny day or a night sky -- has a corresponding effect on the size of our pupils, as if we were actually seeing the image, according to new research. These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that the size of our pupils is not simply a mechanistic response, but one that also adjusts to a subjective sense of brightness. “Visual imagery is a private and subjective experience which is not accompanied by strongly felt or visible physiological changes,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo.