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New Insights Into Personality From Psychological Science
Read about new insights into personality from Psychological Science and Current Directions in Psychological Science. What Is Extraversion For? Integrating Trait and Motivational Perspectives and Identifying the Purpose of Extraversion Kira O. McCabe and William Fleeson Can the goals people pursue predict individual differences in extraverted behavior? Participants used a personal digital assistant to report their current level of extraversion, their momentary goals, and their current level of positive affect 5 times a day for 10 days. The researchers found that within- and between-person fluctuations in levels of extroversion were associated with changes in people's momentary goals.
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Brainy Babies – Research Explores Infants’ Skills and Abilities
Infants seem to develop at an astoundingly rapid pace, learning new things and acquiring new skills every day. And research suggests that the abilities that infants demonstrate early on can shape the development of skills later in life, in childhood and beyond. Read about the latest research on infant development published in the November 2012 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. How Do You Learn to Walk? Thousands of Steps and Dozens of Falls per Day Karen E. Adolph, Whitney G. Cole, Meghana Komati, Jessie S. Garciaguirre, Daryaneh Badaly, Jesse M. Lingeman, Gladys L. Y. Chan, and Rachel B. Sotsky How do babies learn to walk?
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Wandering Minds Are Associated With Aging Cells
Scientific studies have suggested that a wandering mind is linked with unhappiness, whereas a mind that is present in the moment is linked with well-being. Now, a preliminary study suggests a possible connection between mind wandering and aging, by looking at a biological measure of longevity. In the new study, psychological scientist Elissa Epel and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco examined the relationship between telomere length, an emerging biomarker for cellular and general bodily aging, and the tendency to be present in the moment or to mind wander in 239 healthy women who were 50 to 65 years old.
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Embattled Childhoods May Be the Real Trauma for Soldiers With PTSD
New research on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers challenges popular assumptions about the origins and trajectory of PTSD, providing evidence that traumatic experiences in childhood - not combat - may predict which soldiers develop the disorder. Psychological scientist Dorthe Berntsen of Aarhus University in Denmark and a team of Danish and American researchers wanted to understand why some soldiers develop PTSD but others don’t. They also wanted to develop a clearer understanding of how the symptoms of the disorder progress.
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New Research on Memory From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on memory published in the November 2012 issue of Psychological Science. Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Predicts Failure to Recall Negative Autobiographical Memories Benjamin C. Storm and Tara A. Jobe Failure to retrieve memories may not always be a bad thing - we might, for example, prefer to forget about certain instances of heartbreak or failure in favor of some of the more positive events from our lives. In this study, Storm and Jobe asked participants to perform a memory task meant to assess retrieval-induced forgetting - when remembering one piece of information leads to forgetting other information.
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Exploring the Financial Costs of Sadness
Your emotions can certainly impact your decisions, but you might be surprised by the extent to which your emotions affect your pocketbook. New research from psychological scientist Jennifer Lerner of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and colleagues Ye Li and Elke U. Weber of Columbia University explores how impatience brought on by sadness can in turn produce substantial financial loss. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.