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Psychopaths Cheat and Take Risks Due to Impaired Social Understanding
Psychopaths lack moral emotions, are impulsive, and routinely violate social and legal norms. They know right from wrong, but they don't follow the rules. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists tested psychopaths and found that they are not skilled at reasoning about social contracts and taking precautions—which could explain why they cheat and take risks that seem unreasonable to most people. Less than one percent of people are psychopaths, but they make up about 20 percent of the prison population. Psychopaths are prone to impulsive, destructive behavior, committing murders, and other horrendous crimes.
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Do Babies Learn Vocabulary From Baby Media? Study Says No
We all want our children to be smart. Why else would parents spend millions of dollars on videos and DVDS designed and marketed specifically for infants and young children every year? But do they work? NBC’s ‘Today’ show recently suggested that claims from the manufacturers of baby media products may be overblown, and now a new study published in Psychological Science presents empirical evidence that infants who watched an unidentified baby video did not actually learn the words that the video purported to teach. The researchers, led by Judy S. DeLoache of the University of Virginia, recruited 96 families with children between 12 and 18 months of age to participate in a month-long study.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A Spontaneous Self-Reference Effect in Memory: Why Some Birthdays Are Harder to Remember Than Others Selin Kesebir and Shigehiro Oishi People may have a better memory for birthdays that are closer to their own: Volunteers recalling their friends’ birthdays tended to remember birthdays that were closer to their own than birthdays that were farther away from their own birthday. In a separate experiment, after reading brief biographies of people they did not know, volunteers correctly remembered the birthdays of the people whose birthdays were closer to their own than birthdays that were more distant.
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Anger Makes People Want Things More
Anger is an interesting emotion for psychologists. On the one hand, it's negative, but then it also has some of the features of positive emotions. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers find that associating an object with anger actually makes people want the object—a kind of motivation that's normally associated with positive emotions. People usually think of anger as a negative emotion. You're not supposed to get angry. But anger also has some positive features. For example, it activates an area on the left side of the brain that is associated with many positive emotions.
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Not So Fast—Sex Differences in the Brain Are Overblown
People love to speculate about differences between the sexes, and neuroscience has brought a new technology to this pastime. Brain imaging studies are published at a great rate, and some report sex differences in brain structure or patterns of neural activity. But we should be skeptical about reports of brain differences between the sexes, writes psychological scientist Cordelia Fine in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Women’s Choices, Not Abilities, Keep Them Out of Math-Intensive Fields
The question of why women are so underrepresented in math-intensive fields is a controversial one. In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, set off a storm of controversy when he suggested it could be due partly to innate differences in ability; others have suggested discrimination or socialization is more to blame. Two psychological scientists have reviewed all of the evidence and concluded that the main factor is women's choices—both freely made, such as that they'd rather study biology than math, and constrained, such as the fact that the difficult first years as a professor coincide with the time when many women are having children.
