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Respect Matters More Than Money for Happiness in Life
New research suggests that overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you, not to the status that comes from how much money you have stashed in your bank account. Psychological scientist Cameron Anderson of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and his co-authors explore the relationship between different types of status and well-being in a new article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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‘Color Blind’ Policies Could Make Diversity Harder to Achieve
Whether it be growing concerns about bias or recognition of the value of diversity, many organizations and institutions have elected to deemphasize race or remove it entirely from their decision-making processes. Yet new evidence from psychological science research suggests that this color-blind approach may not be as effective as people believe it is. Color blindness offers a seemingly simple way to deal with race: If individuals and institutions do not even notice race, then they cannot act in a biased manner on that basis. But according to a new article published by Evan Apfelbaum of the MIT Sloan School of Management and colleagues, efforts to ignore race can backfire.
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Social-Class Discrimination Contributes to Poorer Health
Discrimination felt by teenagers based on their social class background can contribute to physiological changes associated with poorer health, according to a new study published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Lead author Thomas Fuller-Rowell, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar, says that while the link between poverty and poor health has long been known, this is one of the first studies to consider the impact of class discrimination.
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Knowledge of Fractions and Long Division Predicts Long-Term Math Success
From factory workers to Wall Street bankers, a reasonable proficiency in math is a crucial requirement for most well-paying jobs in a modern economy. Yet, over the past 30 years, mathematics achievement of U.S. high school students has remained stagnant — and significantly behind many other countries, including China, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands and Canada. A research team led by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robert Siegler has identified a major source of the gap — U. S. students’ inadequate knowledge of fractions and division. Although fractions and division are taught in elementary school, even many college students have poor knowledge of them.
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New Research From Current Directions in Psychological Science
Yuko Munakata, Hannah R. Snyder, and Christopher H. Chatham When children are young, they can get stuck in routine ways of thinking and behaving. As children grow, they develop the ability to break out of routines and think more flexibly. In this article, the authors discuss how the development of abstract goal representations supports three key transitions that lead to more flexible behavior. They conclude by discussing the current and future direction of this research. The Brain's Learning and Control Architecture Jason M.
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Training People to Inhibit Movements Can Reduce Risk-Taking
New research from psychological scientists at the Universities of Exeter and Cardiff shows that people can be trained to become less impulsive, resulting in less risk-taking during gambling. The research could pave the way for new treatments for people with addictions to gambling, drugs or alcohol as well as impulse-control disorders, such as ADHD. Recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study assessed whether asking people to stop making simple movements while in a simulated gambling situation affected how risky or cautious they were when betting.
