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The Ties that Bind: Grandparents and their Grandchildren
Close your eyes for a moment, open your treasure trove of memories and take a step back in time to your childhood. Do you remember your grandfather gently scooping you up into his warm and comforting embrace? Or sitting by your grandmother’s side as she lovingly baked pies chock full of delicious, juicy warm apples sprinkled with crumbly cinnamon bits?
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Dusting for Fingerprints – It Ain’t CSI
Fingerprints – dozens of crime dramas revolve around them. The investigators find the victim, dust for fingerprints, run them through a computer program and -voilá- the guilty party is quickly identified and sent to prison. If only it were that easy. The reality is that this common but crucial part of an investigation is done by humans, not by computers. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals that the human factor in the process could lead to errors and false convictions of innocent people.
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Psychologists Discover We’ve Been Underestimating the Unconscious Mind
What does consciousness do? Theories vary, but most neurologists and cognitive psychologists agree that we need awareness for integration. That is, unconscious processing can take in one object or word at a time. But when it comes to pulling together disparate stimuli into a coherent, complex scene, consciousness gets to work. Now, new research by four Israeli psychologists—Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University, and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of Hebrew University of Jerusalem—suggests that scientists have been underestimating the abilities of the unconscious mind. “Integration can happen even when we’re unaware of the stimulus,” says Mudrik.
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Immunity in the Mind
Do our own prejudices and perceptions of people help defend our bodies against infectious disease? An article published in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that our brains contain a sort of "behavioral immune system" that defends against disease even before disease-causing pathogens reach our bodies. Mark Schaller, of the University of British Columbia, who co-authored the article with Justin H.
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On 9/11, Americans may not have been as angry as you thought they were
On September 11, 2001, the air was sizzling with anger—and the anger got hotter as the hours passed. That, anyway, was one finding of a 2010 analysis by Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, and Boris Egloff of 85,000 pager messages sent that day. The researchers employed a commonly used tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, which teases out information from the frequency of word usages in texts. But were Americans really so angry? Clemson University psychologist Cynthia L. S. Pury wasn’t out to answer this question when she made the discovery that was just published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
The Use of Definite References Signals Declarative Memory: Evidence From Patients With Hippocampal Amnesia Melissa C. Duff, Rupa Gupta, Julie A. Hengst, Daniel Tranel, and Neal J. Cohen Most people will use declarative references to save time and mental resources when they are having a conversation. For example, a person might say “the game” instead of “a game” if they know the other person is aware of what they are talking about. To test whether declarative memory was required for the use of definite references, patients with hippocampal amnesia were asked to complete a communication task with a partner they were familiar with.
