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Facebook and Smartphones: New Tools for Psychological Science Research—News Brief
WASHINGTON -- Whether you’re an iPerson who can’t live without a Mac, a Facebook addict, or a gamer, you know that social media and technology say things about your personality and thought processes. And psychological scientists know it too – they’ve started researching how new media and devices both reveal and change our mental states. Two recent articles in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, explored how trends in technology are changing the questions psychological scientists are asking and the ways they ask them.
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Parents Are Happier People
Contrary to recent scholarship and popular belief, parents experience greater levels of happiness and meaning in life than people without children, according to researchers from the University of California, Riverside, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University. Parents also are happier during the day when they are caring for their children than during their other daily activities, the researchers found in a series of studies conducted in the United States and Canada. These findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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People See Sexy Pictures of Women as Objects, Not People
Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women’s sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people. Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. “What’s unclear is, we don’t actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects,” says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
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Religion Replenishes Self-Control
There are many theories about why religion exists, most of them unproven. Now, in an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Kevin Rounding of Queen’s University, Ontario, offers a new idea, and some preliminary evidence to back it up. The primary purpose of religious belief is to enhance the basic cognitive process of self-control, says Rounding, which in turn promotes any number of valuable social behaviors. He ran four experiments in which he primed volunteers to think about religious matters. Those volunteers showed more discipline than controls, and more ability to delay gratification.
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The Gifts We Keep On Giving
With so many holidays and celebrations, who can blame someone for doing a little recycling, or as it is commonly known, regifting? Not the person who actually gave the original gift, despite what a regifter may think.
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Small “Neural Focus Groups” Predict Anti-Smoking Ad Campaign Success
Brain scans of a small group of people can predict the actions of entire populations, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon and the University of California, Los Angeles. The findings are relevant to political advertising, commercial market research, and public health campaigns, and broaden the use of brain imaging from a diagnostic to a predictive tool.
