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Placebo Effect Largely Ignored in Psychological Intervention Studies
Many brain-training companies tout the scientific backing of their products -- the laboratory studies that reveal how their programs improve your brainpower. But according to a new report, most intervention studies like these have a critical flaw: They do not adequately account for the placebo effect. The new analysis appears in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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How the Brain Creates the ‘Buzz’ That Helps Ideas Spread
How do ideas spread? Are we able to predict what messages will go viral on social media? New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, takes a significant step towards answering these questions, identifying for the first time a brain region associated with the successful spread of ideas, or viral “buzz.” "Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people," says the study's senior author Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Temporary Deafness Can Impair Multisensory Integration: A Study of Cochlear-Implant Users Simon P. Landry, Jean-Paul Guillemot, and François Champoux Does temporary deafness in adults disrupt other multisensory processes? Participants who had or had not experienced a period of deafness performed a nonspeech task meant to illicit an audiotactile illusion. Participants without a history of hearing loss experienced the audiotactile illusion, whereas those with restored hearing did not. This suggests that the maintenance of audiotactile processes might require an uninterrupted bond between the two modalities.
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Teens’ Self-Consciousness Linked With Specific Brain, Physiological Responses
Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge in adolescence. “Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.
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Senior Moment? Ageist Stereotypes Can Hurt — Or Help — Older Adults’ Memory
Of the many negative stereotypes that exist about older adults, the most common is that they are forgetful, senile, and prone to so-called “senior moments.” In fact, while cognitive processes tend to decline with age, new research reveals that simply reminding older adults about ageist ideas actually exacerbates their memory problems. The new findings are forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Getting Kids to Eat Their Veggies: A New Approach to an Age-Old Problem
Every parent has a different strategy for trying to get his or her kid to eat more vegetables, from growing vegetables together as a family to banning treats until the dinner plate is clean. New research suggests that teaching young children an overarching, conceptual framework for nutrition may do the trick. The new findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that a conceptual framework encourages children to understand why eating a variety of foods is ideal and also causes them to eat more vegetables by choice.
