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Immune Response May Link Social Rejection to Later Health Outcomes
Data from healthy adolescents indicate that recent exposure to targeted rejection activates the molecular signaling pathways that regulate inflammation.
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Calling Miss Congeniality – Do Attractive People Have Attractive Traits and Values?
We’ve all been warned not to “judge a book by its cover,” but inevitably we do it anyway. It’s difficult to resist the temptation of assuming that a person’s outward appearance reflects something meaningful about his or her inner personality. Indeed, research shows that people tend to perceive attractive adults as more social, successful, and well-adjusted than less attractive adults, a phenomenon that’s been termed the “what is beautiful is good” stereotype. But could that really be true? Are physically attractive people really just as attractive on the inside as they are on the outside?
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New Research on Vision From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on vision published in Psychological Science. A Bayesian Optimal Foraging Model of Human Visual Search Matthew S. Cain, Edward Vul, Kait Clark, and Stephen R. Mitroff When searching displays containing an unknown number of targets, it can be difficult to know when to stop searching. In this study, researchers quantified visual-search strategies by having participants look for targets among distractors. In the first condition, only 25% of the trials had one or more targets; in the second condition, 50% of the trials had one or more targets; and in the third condition, 75% of the trials had one or more targets.
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More than Just ‘Zoning Out’ – Psychological Science Examines the Cognitive Processes Underlying Mind Wandering
It happens innocently enough: One minute you’re sitting at your desk, working on a report, and the next minute you’re thinking about how you probably need to do laundry and that you want to try the new restaurant down the street. Mind wandering is a frequent and common occurrence. And while mind wandering in certain situations – in class, for example – can be counterproductive, some research suggests that mind wandering isn’t necessarily a bad thing. New research published in the journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores mind wandering in various contexts, examining how mind wandering is related to cognitive processes involved in working memory and executive control.
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The Good, the Bad, and the Guilty: Anticipating Feelings of Guilt Predicts Ethical Behavior
From politics to finance, government to education, ethics-related scandals seem to crop up with considerable regularity. As whistleblowers and investigative journalists bring these scandals to light, one can’t help but wonder: Are there specific character traits that predispose people to unethical behavior? Converging evidence suggests that the answer could be guilt proneness. In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Taya Cohen and Nazli Turan of Carnegie Mellon University and A.T.
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Looking Out for #1 Can Make You Happy, If You Have No Choice
We are, at our core, social creatures and we spend considerable time and effort on building and maintaining our relationships with others. As young children, we’re taught that “sharing means caring” and, as we mature, we learn to take others’ point of view. If we make a decision that favors self-interest, we often feel guilt for prioritizing ourselves over others. In prioritizing others, however, we sometimes forego the things that we know will make us happy. This raises an intriguing question: Is there any way to pursue self-interest without feeling bad about it? Can we have the proverbial cake and it eat it, too?