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Tight Times May Change Our Perceptions of Who ‘Belongs’
From the playground to the office, a key aspect of our social lives involves figuring out who “belongs” and who doesn’t. Our biases lead us -- whether we're aware of it or not -- to favor people who belong to our own social group. Scientists theorize that these prevalent in-group biases may give us a competitive advantage against others, especially when important resources are limited. Psychological scientist Christopher Rodeheffer and his colleagues at Texas Christian University wanted to examine whether resource scarcity might actually lead us to change our definition of who belongs to our social group.
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Bothered by Negative, Unwanted Thoughts? Just Throw Them Away
If you want to get rid of unwanted, negative thoughts, try just ripping them up and tossing them in the trash. In a new study, researchers found that when people wrote down their thoughts on a piece of paper and then threw the paper away, they mentally discarded the thoughts as well. The results are published online in the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. On the other hand, people were more likely to use their thoughts when making judgments if they first wrote them down on a piece of paper and tucked the paper in a pocket to protect it.
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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.
