-
Niceness Is at Least Partly in the Genes
What makes some people give blood and bake casseroles for their neighbors, while others mutter about taxes from behind closed blinds? A new paper published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science finds that part of the answer—but not all—may be in their genes. The hormones oxytocin and vasopressin are thought to affect how people behave toward each other. For example, lab tests have found that people play nicer in economic games after having oxytocin squirted up their nose. “This is an attempt to take this into the real world a little bit,” says Michael Poulin, of the University at Buffalo.
-
The Psychological Science of Relationships – News Brief
Association for Psychological Science 202-293-9300 (April 16, 2012) -- Our relationships with others are an essential part of everyday life, but that doesn’t mean that understanding and getting along with other people is easy. Here is some of the latest research on the mechanisms that drive our social interactions from the journal Psychological Science. ********** You Give Me the Chills: Embodied Reactions to Inappropriate Amounts of Behavioral Mimicry Lead author: N. Pontus Leander - University of Groningen – [email protected] – in press There are some people who just give us ‘the chills,’ even though they seem perfectly polite and pleasant.
-
Being in Power Does Not Always Magnify Personality
“If you want to test a man’s character, give him power,” said Abraham Lincoln. It’s a truism that power magnifies personality—but is it true? A new study says no. “Before, people thought that disposition is linked to will; it’s mainly internally driven,” says University College London psychologist Ana Guinote, who conducted the study with Mario Weick of the University of Kent and London doctoral student Alice Cai. “Our findings show that the environment crucially triggers dispositional or counter-dispositional behavior in powerful people.” The findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
-
Consumerism and its antisocial effects can be turned on—or off
Money doesn’t buy happiness. Neither does materialism: Research shows that people who place a high value on wealth, status, and stuff are more depressed and anxious and less sociable than those who do not. Now new research shows that materialism is not just a personal problem. It’s also environmental. “We found that irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mindset, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in wellbeing, including negative affect and social disengagement,” says Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen. The study, conducted with colleagues Monika A. Bauer, James E. B. Wilkie, and Jung K.
-
Income Inequality and Distrust Foster Academic Dishonesty
College professors and students are in an arms race over cheating. Students find new sources for pre-written term papers; professors find new ways to check the texts they get for plagiarized material. But why are all these young people cheating? A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests one reason: income inequality, which decreases the general trust people have toward each other. Lukas Neville, a doctoral student at Queen’s University in Ontario, was inspired to do the study by his own teaching experience. “I ran into the question of academic dishonesty firsthand,” he says.
-
Brain Stores Objects by Color, Too
How do we know what a lemon is, or a baseball? “Theories that explain how our brains store knowledge say that similar knowledge is stored in similar places. So things that are related - in how they look, how they smell, and so on - should overlap in the brain,” says Eiling Yee of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, & Language. In other words, the same part of your brain might store the information that both lemons and canaries are yellow. This sort of overlap has been shown for certain properties of objects, like their shape and function, or even for how you manipulate them with your hands.
