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Aging photographs and cognitive quilts
I am a Baby Boomer and a child of the ‘60s, and for both those reasons I am keenly aware of my memory, and its failings. I’m not alone in this. For a growing number of adults, questions about cognitive aging are increasingly personal and relevant. We want to know what, specifically, will keep us sharp into old age. Will reading Tolstoy do it? Or playing racquetball? Taking a class in Civil War history, or Portuguese? How about mastering Thai cooking? Or simply surrounding ourselves with good friends and stimulating conversation? Unhappily, there is very little empirical evidence available to help Baby Boomers sort all this out.
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Placebo Effect Largely Ignored in Psychological Intervention Studies
Many brain-training companies tout the scientific backing of their products -- the laboratory studies that reveal how their programs improve your brainpower. But according to a new report, most intervention studies like these have a critical flaw: They do not adequately account for the placebo effect. The new analysis appears in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Why Self-Consciousness Peaks in Teenage Years
LiveScience: Some of the more awkward growth spurts that mark adolescence occur in the brain, and a new study suggests certain developmental changes might make teens ultra-sensitive to the gaze of other people. ... "We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," study researcher Leah Somerville, a psychological scientist at Harvard University, said in a statement. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement." Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Studies show how to be better consumers
Chicago Tribune: Would you pay 50 percent more for "organic" firewood? Would you be more willing to buy a used refrigerator if it had an "attractive enamel-coated ferromagnetic exterior?" Would you be more likely to buy juice from a server with a British accent? Of course, all firewood is organic, magnets stick to many refrigerators, and the desire for juice should be unrelated to a seller's accent. Still, we consumers are not always rational and can be tricked by sellers. We sometimes open our wallets for marketing gimmicks like these examples from a message board posting on Reddit.com. There's a whole area of academic study about consumer behavior that examines not what we buy, but why.
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Boss: I’m sure you agree!
The Boston Globe: Power corrupts in many ways—for one, it tends to make you think everyone else feels just like you do. In a new study, people who were put in a high-power frame of mind more readily assumed that their own personal traits and organizational values would be shared by other group members. People in a high-power frame of mind also more readily projected their own bad moods onto others. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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How the Brain Creates the ‘Buzz’ That Helps Ideas Spread
How do ideas spread? Are we able to predict what messages will go viral on social media? New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, takes a significant step towards answering these questions, identifying for the first time a brain region associated with the successful spread of ideas, or viral “buzz.” "Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people," says the study's senior author Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.
