-
How Powerful People Think
TIME: Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us — isn’t that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: Power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. People who feel powerful also show improved “executive functioning”: They are better able to concentrate, plan, inhibit unhelpful impulses and flexibly adapt to change.
-
John R. Anderson
Carnegie Mellon University William James Fellow Award John Anderson is widely known for his cognitive architecture, ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought — Rational), a theory dealing primarily with memory structure. He was also an early leader in research on intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), computer systems that provide immediate and customized instruction or feedback to learners. ACT-R is described as a way of specifying how the brain itself is organized in a way that enables individual processing modules to produce cognition. Using the ACT-R model, Anderson’s studies have looked at neural processes of people while they are solving complex problems such as algebraic equations.
-
Karen A. Matthews
University of Pittsburgh James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award Karen Matthews is renowned for her many and multi-faceted contributions to the formation and growth of health psychology as a discipline. Her research accomplishments have included seminal work on childhood antecedents of coronary heart disease risk, women's health and menopause, and the effects of socioeconomic status on health. Early in her career, Matthews helped set the stage for future educational and training models through her participation in the landmark National Working Group on Education and Training in Health Psychology.
-
Carol Dweck
Stanford University James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award As one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of motivation, Carol Dweck’s work bridges developmental, social, and personality psychology, and examines the mindsets people use to guide their behavior. Her work has demonstrated the role of mindsets in people’s motivation and has shown how praise for intelligence can undermine motivation and learning. Dweck’s empirical work has revealed that when we see ourselves as possessing fixed attributes (the fixed mindset), we blind ourselves to our potential for growth and prematurely give up on engaging in constructive, self-improving behaviors.
-
New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science. Attentional Capture Does Not Depend on Feature Similarity, but on Target-Nontarget Relations Stefanie I. Becker, Charles L. Folk, and Roger W. Remington What determines which part of a scene will be visually selected? Most top-down accounts suggest that once a target feature (e.g., color) is selected, items most similar to this feature should attract attention. However, according to a new relational account, the visual system can evaluate the relationship between the target feature and the feature of irrelevant nontarget items and direct attention toward items with the same relationship.
-
Predicting Resilience in Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse
Childhood sexual abuse can have devastating and long-lasting consequences for survivors, yet little research has focused on the factors associated with resiliency following childhood sexual abuse. New research published in Clinical Psychological Science reveals that certain demographic, personality, and abuse-related variables predict the well-being of childhood sexual abuse survivors later in life. Using an online survey of more than 47,000 people between the ages of 18 and 80, psychological scientists Claire Whitelock, Michael Lamb, and Peter Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge (UK) collected data on each of these variables.
