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Anxiety Can Bring Out the Best
The Wall Street Journal: You have an important presentation tomorrow but your heart is racing and your mind is serving up a steady stream of what-ifs: What if I'm not fully prepared? What if it goes badly? You're running out of time. The last thing you need is all this anxiety. Actually, a little anxiety may be just what you need to focus your efforts and perform at your peak, psychologists say. Somewhere between checked out and freaked out lies an anxiety sweet spot, some researchers say, in which a person is motivated to succeed yet not so anxious that performance takes a dive.
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Fractions Are Key To Math Success, New Study Shows
CBS Detroit: ANN ARBOR — What part of math success comes from knowing fractions? More than you might think, according to a new study that analyzed long-term data on more than 4,000 children from both the United States and the United Kingdom.
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A Fan’s Brain
The New Yorker: The psychology of sports fandom is often so obvious and unsubtle in its raw tribalism that it can seem silly to apply academic rigor to the subject. “They Saw a Game: A Case Study” is considered a seminal paper in the sports-psychology subgenre. First published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, in 1954, it brought the scientific method to bear on students’ reactions to a particularly violent football game between Princeton and Dartmouth.
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Respect of peers more important than money
The Telegraph: The admiration and respect of our peers has a greater bearing on our overall happiness in life than our bank balance or the status associated with being rich, researchers found. Psychologists from the University of California, Berkeley carried out four studies to observe the connection between various types of status and our overall happiness in life. In one study, the researchers carried out a survey of 80 university students who between them were involved in 12 different social groups such as sororities.
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You Choose, They Lose: The Psychology of Income Inequality
Pacific Standard: Paper or plastic? PC or Mac? Do you want fries with that? American culture is all about making choices. And two scholars report that mulling over our options affects how we think about economic inequality. “When the concept of choice was highlighted,” they write, “people (taking part in a series of experiments) were less disturbed by statistics demonstrating wealth inequality, less likely to believe that societal factors contribute to the success of the wealthy, less willing to endorse redistributing educational resources more equally between the rich and the poor, and less willing to endorse increased taxes on the rich.” Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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Fear of Pain Can Lead to Suffering
People go to great lengths to avoid pain. And that avoidance, ironically, may be a cause of chronic pain. When a person is injured, they begin to associate the injury with the activity that caused it, and they will avoid that activity – and other activities. In the short term, avoidance may promote healing, but over time, fear of pain may actually initiate chronic pain, leading to disability and depression. Psychological scientists in this symposium shared many approaches for investigating this surprising model of pain behavior. One technique was based on classical conditioning, in which volunteers were given a shock in response to a particular movement they performed.
