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From Sadness to Anxiety: The Emotional Legacy of Sandy Hook
Pacific Standard: The truism—apparently first uttered by Steve Allen, the original host of the Tonight Show—is that tragedy plus time equals comedy. But a newly published study that looked at responses to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre suggests a different equation: Tragedy plus time equals anxiety. Analyzing a large dataset of Twitter messages, a Columbia University research team led by psychologists Bruce Doré and Kevin Ochsner found a decrease in sadness-related words the further removed commenters were from the horrible incident, in terms of either time or distance.
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Gender equality in science: a better future for everyone
The Guardian: The scarcity of women in the ranks of working scientists has been in the news for a discouragingly long time. But research studies designed to explain the reasons for this gender disparity are filled contradictions, mainly because they were conducted at different times and on different science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Last year the Association for Psychological Research published a monograph about women in STEM fields in their journal, Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
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Psychopath. Successful psychopath.
Forest “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas was a real-life swashbuckler, charismatic and daring. The World War II British spy, known as the “White Rabbit” to the Nazis, employed an array of disguises and fake documents to elude the enemy in Vichy France, once pretending to be a corpse while traveling in a coffin. He withstood severe torture by the Gestapo, leapt from a moving train, and strangled a prison guard with his bare hands. He was also known as a seducer of beautiful women. Most people have never heard of Yeo-Thomas, though most are familiar with his fictional incarnation. He was the inspiration for novelist Ian Fleming’s flamboyant hero Bond. James Bond.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Illusory Feature Slowing: Evidence for Perceptual Models of Global Facial Change Richard Cook, Clarisse Aichelburg, and Alan Johnston Much of the research examining face perception has studied static faces; there is less research examining how we process faces in motion. Participants viewed two faces: a standard face that was presented in an upright or an inverted position and a comparison face that was always presented upright. The eyes and the mouth of the standard face opened and closed, while only the eyes on the comparison face moved.
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A Disagreeable Personality Can Help Get Original Ideas Noticed
Infamously disagreeable innovators ranging from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs have helped to propagate the idea that being headstrong and aggressive may be linked with creative genius. After all, creative success isn’t just about coming up with an innovative idea -- you also have to convince others to get behind your idea, and this is where researchers find that being a jerk may come in handy. But new research shows that you don’t have to be a jerk to come up with the next game-changing creative idea.
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Speaking a second language may change how you see the world
Science: Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences, influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study. The work also finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more flexible. ... The results suggest that a second language can play an important unconscious role in framing perception, the authors conclude online this month in Psychological Science.
