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Looking Out for #1 Can Make You Happy, If You Have No Choice
We are, at our core, social creatures and we spend considerable time and effort on building and maintaining our relationships with others. As young children, we’re taught that “sharing means caring” and, as we mature, we learn to take others’ point of view. If we make a decision that favors self-interest, we often feel guilt for prioritizing ourselves over others. In prioritizing others, however, we sometimes forego the things that we know will make us happy. This raises an intriguing question: Is there any way to pursue self-interest without feeling bad about it? Can we have the proverbial cake and it eat it, too?
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Anxiety Disorders and Depression Conference
Anxiety and Depression: Technology and New Media in Practice and Research April 4-7, 2013 Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine (La Jolla, California) Contact: 240-485-1032 [email protected] Website: http://adaa.org/resources-professionals/conference ADAA hosts the only conference focusing exclusively on advancing science and treatment of generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, PTSD, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, phobias, depression, suicide risk, and comorbid illnesses in children and adults.
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New Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Science Research (IBSS) Competition
The Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Science Research (IBSS) has a two new support opportunities for Interdisciplinary research projects under solicitation number NSF 12-614. Proposals for: 1. IBSS Large Interdisciplinary Research Projects. Large interdisciplinary research projects may be supported by awards as large as $1,000,000. 2. IBSS Interdisciplinary Team Exploratory Projects. Exploratory research by emerging multidisciplinary teams may be supported by awards as large as $250,000. View complete information about the Program Solicitation NSF 12-614 online.
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Testing Can Be Useful for Students and Teachers, Promoting Long-Term Learning
Pop quiz! Tests are good for: (a) Assessing what you’ve learned; (b) Learning new information; (c) a & b; (d) None of the above. The correct answer? According to research from psychological science, it’s both (a) and (b) – while testing can be useful as an assessment tool, the actual process of taking a test can also help us to learn and retain new information over the long term and apply it across different contexts. New research published in journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores the nuanced interactions between testing, memory, and learning and suggests possible applications for testing in educational settings.
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Building Emotions
Emotions like anger, sadness, and fear have traditionally been thought of as innate, discrete entities, each with its own biological core: An event (seeing a snake) triggers a particular hardwired emotion (fear) and its corresponding behavioral and physiological responses (an adrenaline surge, screaming, running away). As Lisa Feldman Barrett has found, however, this view is not well supported by the scientific literature, and so she has developed a model that is more in line with the data.
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Can You Trust Nexi?
People face this predicament all the time—can you determine a person’s character in a single interaction? Can you judge whether someone you just met can be trusted when you have only a few minutes together? And if you can, how do you do it? Using a robot named Nexi, Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno and collaborators Cynthia Breazeal from MIT’s Media Lab and Robert Frank and David Pizarro from Cornell University have figured out the answer. The findings will be published in the journal Psychological Science.
