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High-Testosterone Competitors More Likely to Choose Red
Why do so many sports players and athletes choose to wear the color red when they compete? A new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that it may have to do with their testosterone levels. The new study, conducted by psychological scientist Daniel Farrelly of the University of Sunderland and colleagues, demonstrated that males who chose red as their color in a competitive task had higher testosterone levels than other males who chose blue. “The research shows that there is something special about the color red in competition, and that it is associated with our underlying biological systems,” says Farrelly.
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Political Motivations May Have Evolutionary Links to Physical Strength
Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The principal investigators of the research -- psychological scientists Michael Bang Petersen of Aarhus University, Denmark and Daniel Sznycer of University of California, Santa Barbara -- believe that the link may reflect psychological traits that evolved in response to our early ancestral environments and continue to influence behavior today. “While many think of politics as a modern phenomenon, it has -- in a sense -- always been with our species,” says Petersen.
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When Deciding How to Bet, Less Detailed Information May Be Better
People are worse at predicting whether a sports team will win, lose, or tie when they bet on the final score than when they bet on the overall outcome, according to a new study published
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Object-Based Attention Without Awareness Liam J. Norman, Charles A. Heywood, and Robert W. Kentridge Attentional selection can facilitate the processing of basic properties of unseen stimuli; however, it is still unknown whether this selection extends to more complex properties of stimuli. Participants performed a task in which a cue appeared inside one of two rectangles that were masked from their conscious attention. After the cue, a target appeared in one of the masked rectangles. Participants processed targets appearing within the same rectangle as the cue more rapidly than they processed targets in the other rectangle.
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Social Connections Drive the ‘Upward Spiral’ of Positive Emotions and Health
People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, led by Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bethany Kok of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences also found it is possible for a person to self-generate positive emotions in ways that make him or her physically healthier. “People tend to liken their emotions to the weather, viewing them as uncontrollable,” says Fredrickson.
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Early Math and Reading Ability Linked to Job and Income in Adulthood
Math and reading ability at age 7 are linked with socioeconomic status several decades later, over and above associations with intelligence, education, and childhood socioeconomic status.