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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.
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The Road to Language Learning Is Iconic
Languages are highly complex systems and yet most children seem to acquire language easily, even in the absence of formal instruction. New research on young children’s use of British Sign Language (BSL) sheds light on one mechanism - iconicity - that may play an important role in children's ability to learn language. For spoken and written language, the arbitrary relationship between a word’s form – how it sounds or how it looks on paper – and its meaning is a particularly challenging feature of language acquisition. But one of the first things people notice about sign languages is that signs often represent aspects of meaning in their form.
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New Research On Visual Perception From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on visual perception from Psychological Science. Inattention Abolishes Binocular Rivalry: Perceptual Evidence Jan W. Brascamp and Randolph Blake Binocular rivalry occurs when a different image is shown to each eye and instead of seeing one image, the viewer shifts between the two images. In this study, researchers examined the effects of attention on binocular rivalry by presenting participants with visually different stimuli in each eye.
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New Insights Into Cognitive Control From Psychological Science
Read about new insights into cognitive control from Psychological Science and Current Directions in Psychological Science. Memory and Cognitive Control in Task Switching Franziska R. Richter and Nick Yeung Although researchers know that cognitive control affects memory and vice versa, the interconnections between these two have only recently been examined. Participants performed a classification task in which they were shown displays that contained task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli. Participants then performed a surprise recognition test that evaluated their memory for the previously presented stimuli.
