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How Changing Visual Cues Can Affect Attitudes About Weight
NPR: With most Americans fat or fatter, you'd think we'd be lightening up on the anti-fat attitudes. Alas, no. Even doctors often think their overweight patients are weak-willed. But changing negative attitudes about body size might be as simple as changing what you see. When women in England were shown photos of plus-sized women in neutral gray leotards, they became more tolerant. When the women were shown photos of anorexic women, attitudes became more positive there, too.
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How Long Will a Lie Last? New Study Finds That False Memories Linger for Years
Scientific American: True memories fade and false ones appear. Each time we recall something, the memory is imperfectly re-stitched by our brains. Our memories retain familiarity but, like our childhood blankets, can be recognizable yet filled with holes and worn down with time. To date, research has shown that it is fairly easy to take advantage of our fallible memory. Elizabeth Loftus, cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory, has found that simply changing one word in a question can contort what we recall. In one experiment, Loftus had participants watch a film of a car crash, and then asked about what they saw.
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Do beautiful women have more socially desirable personalities?
NY Daily News: Beautiful women are often thought to be more social, successful, and well-adjusted than their less attractive counterparts. But a new study announced Monday finds that attractive women are more likely to have some not-so-pretty values, such as favoring social conformity and self-promotion over tolerance. Researchers from the Open University of Israel and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem investigated 118 university students averaging around 29-years-old. Subjects then completed surveys about their values and were videotaped walking around a room, reading a weather forecast, and then leaving the room.
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Study Looks at Bias in Celebration Penalty Calls
The New York Times: A Kansas City Chiefs cornerback returns an interception 58 yards for a touchdown, then flexes his biceps in the end zone with one foot resting on the ball. A Seattle wide receiver makes a throat-slashing gesture after catching a 52-yard pass for a score. A running back for Green Bay lies on his back in the end zone and waves his legs and arms to mime a snow angel after an 80-yard scoring catch. After an 18-yard touchdown catch on Jan. 1, a Buffalo receiver exposes an undershirt that has “Happy New Year” written on it. Each of these touchdown celebrations last season resulted in a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.
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New Research on Memory From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on memory published in the November 2012 issue of Psychological Science. Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Predicts Failure to Recall Negative Autobiographical Memories Benjamin C. Storm and Tara A. Jobe Failure to retrieve memories may not always be a bad thing - we might, for example, prefer to forget about certain instances of heartbreak or failure in favor of some of the more positive events from our lives. In this study, Storm and Jobe asked participants to perform a memory task meant to assess retrieval-induced forgetting - when remembering one piece of information leads to forgetting other information.
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Psychologists do some soul-searching
Nature News Blog: Psychologists are going through a period of intense self-reflection regarding the reliability of research in their field, fuelled by recently uncovered cases of fraud, failed attempts to replicate classic results, and calls from prominent psychologists to replicate key results in disputed fields. The latest volley in this debate is a special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, consisting of 18 papers that outline the scope of the so-called “replicability crisis”, and potential ways of fixing it.
