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Failure Is an Option
Parents Magazine: Whenever Helena Bogosian takes her daughters, Margot, 5, and Nina, 4, out to eat, she asks if they can have the same toy in their kids' meal so neither feels slighted. But one time the girls got different things because the restaurant had run out of the plastic grasshoppers they both wanted. Margot started crying hysterically, so the Tenafly, New Jersey, mom drove to four more franchises in fruitless pursuit of matching toys. By the time she gave up, it was dark, the kids were fast asleep in their car seats, and she felt foolish. "I learned that avoiding a child's disappointment can be harder than helping her deal with it," she says.
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Study: More women winemakers are making names for themselves
The Washington Post: In 1978, the first vintage that Cathy Corison made wine, she could count on one hand the number of women she knew of doing the same kind of work in the cellars of the Napa Valley. Without using all her fingers. Nearly 35 years later, Corison needs a lot more fingers. Winemaking remains primarily a man’s world, but research by Santa Clara University professors Lucia Albino Gilbert and John Gilbert has found that nearly 10 percent of California wineries now have women as the main or lead winemaker. Their second finding: Women winemakers tend to be more highly acclaimed than their male counterparts. Why?
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Why Misinformation Sticks and Corrections Can Backfire
TIME: At the height of campaign season in any presidential election year, voters will be inundated with all kinds of information of dubious accuracy, from misleading claims about candidates’ personal lives to exaggerations about their policy differences. Unfortunately, it’s precisely this type of misinformation — the kind that hews to people’s preexisting political, religious or social ideology — that sticks. As a new review of past research concludes, “mud” sticks — and, worse, attempts to correct erroneous beliefs can backfire, reinforcing the very misrepresentations they aim to erase.
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Interested in Becoming an APSSC Student Reviewer?
The APSSC is currently offering motivated graduate and undergraduate student affiliates the opportunity to serve as reviewers for the Student Grant Competition. As a reviewer you will evaluate the merit of assigned research proposals using an established scoring system and provide written feedback on each submission. Taking part will provide you with firsthand experience of the academic review process while boosting your vita. For more information and to sign up, please visit the reviewer webpage at www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/rise/reviewer Ian Hussey, Graduate Advocate (apssc.graduate@psychologicalscience.org)
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New Research on Social Cognition From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on social cognition published in Psychological Science. Reading Between the Minds: The Use of Stereotypes in Empathic Accuracy Karyn L. Lewis, Sara D. Hodges, Sean M. Laurent, Sanjay Srivastava, and Gina Biancarosa Do stereotypes help us determine what people are thinking? Participants watched a movie of a new mother and at certain points were asked to infer what the mother was thinking at that moment. Researchers then compared the accuracy of the participants' inferences to the mother's actual thoughts. Researchers also coded the stereotypicality of both the mother's and the participants' thoughts.
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Rx for Sisyphus: Take two Tylenol…
For the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus, the Greek myth of Sisyphus perfectly captured the human condition. Sisyphus was condemned to a life of meaningless activity—pushing a boulder up a hill again and again and again, without purpose or accomplishment. If the miscreant king had any hope of finding meaning in this existence, it had to come from inside him. This is the existential condition, as philosophers have described it from the 19th century on. Understanding the absurdity of it—and understanding that one is personally responsible for making life meaningful—can be a source of overpowering anxiety and unease—what philosophers have called existential dread.
