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Evidence that Priming Affiliation Increases Helping Behavior in Infants As Young As 18 Months
Most of us are willing to help a neighbor in need, but there’s no question that we pay a price for our altruism. Not necessarily in money, but in valuable time and energy, and with no promise of payback. So, why do we engage in prosocial behavior in the first place? Psychologists believe that these actions stem from the innate social nature of humans. One idea is that group living has been so crucial to human survival for so long that there are automatic connections between group affiliation and helping behavior. If that’s so, then the mere hint of the group may be enough to induce prosocial behavior even in infants.
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The Link Between Weight and Importance
Weighty. Heavy. What do these words have to do with seriousness and importance? Why do we weigh our options, and why does your opinion carry more weight than mine? New research suggests that we can blame this on gravity. Heavy objects require more energy to move, and they can hurt us more if we move them clumsily. So we learn early on in life to think more and plan more when we’re dealing with heftier things. They require more cognitive effort as well as muscular effort. This leads to the intriguing possibility that the abstract concept of importance is grounded in our very real experience of weight.
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White as Snow, Black as Sin: The Colors of Moral Purity and Pollution
What do wedding dresses and doves have to do with toothpaste and soap? Psychologists Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore from the University of Virginia found that the perceptual symbols of purity, such as snow and doves, are associated with the color white and the feeling of cleanliness, while the symbols of immorality are associated with feelings of dirtiness and the color black. As reported in a recent issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, people greatly desired products dealing with self-cleanliness after they were invoked with a feeling of immorality.
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Time of the Month Matters: Increased Racial Bias and the Menstrual Cycle
Can racial bias be affected by the time of the month? According to a study in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, a woman’s menstrual cycle can affect not only her mood but may cause a racial bias as well. Psychologist Carlos David Navarrete from Michigan State University and his colleagues have been studying the evolutionary preference toward mating--that is, women only mate with the “in-group” of males and shun anyone from the “out-group.” It turns out this bias has been modified in the present day to include skin color.
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Increases in Brain’s Motivation can result in Diminished Performance
Choking under pressure affects us all. Psychologists are very interested in this phenomenon, because choking sabotages performance not only in big sports contests but in the classroom and workplace as well. A study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science may offer some insight into why we crumble under pressure. Psychologist and neuroscientist Dean Mobbs of University College London (and a large team of colleagues) decided to look inside the brains of people during competition, both when the stakes were low and when they were high.
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Smile As You Read This: Language That Puts You in Touch With Your Bodily Feelings
Louis Armstrong sang, “When you’re smilin’, the whole world smiles with you.” Romantics everywhere may be surprised to learn that psychological research has proven this sentiment to be true — merely seeing a smile (or a frown, for that matter) will activate the muscles in our face that make that expression, even if we are unaware of it. Now, according to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, simply reading certain words may also have the same effect. Psychologists Francesco Foroni from VU University Amsterdam and Gün R.
