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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.
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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.
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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.
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Age Brings Happiness
Scientific American Mind Do people get happier or crankier as they age? Stereotypes of crotchety neighbors aside, scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been conflicting. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being indeed increases with age—but overall happiness depends on when a person was born. Previous studies that have compared older adults with the middle-aged and young have sometimes found that older adults are not as happy. But these studies could not discern whether their discontent was because of their age or because of their different life experience.
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Tylenol Fights Headaches…and Existential Angst?
Smithsonian Magazine: Everyone knows you can pop a Tylenol to ease a headache or reduce a fever. But that’s not all. A new study suggests that you can also take Tylenol to ease the psychological angst of watching weird, twisted David Lynch films, or to generally ward off existential dread of death and nothingness. In what is perhaps one of the oddest studies in recent memory, researchers in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia hypothesized that overwhelming feelings of pointlessness and physical pain may be located in the same part of the brain, LiveScience explains.
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Playing for All Kinds of Possibilities
The New York Times: When it comes to play, humans don’t play around. And in doing so, they develop some of humanity’s most consequential faculties. They learn the art, pleasure and power of hypothesis — of imagining new possibilities. And serious students of play believe that this helps make the species great. The idea that play contributes to human success goes back at least a century. But in the last 25 years or so, researchers like Elizabeth S. Spelke, Brian Sutton-Smith, Jaak Panksepp and Alison Gopnik have developed this notion more richly and tied it more closely to both neuroscience and human evolution.
