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Get Me Out of this Slump! Visual Illusions Improve Sports Performance
One way players might be able to improve their chances at making key shots is by tricking themselves into thinking the goal, the basket, or the target is bigger than it really is. Visit Page
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APS Fellow Helps Make Life With Autism a Little Easier
When she was a graduate student in the late 1970s, APS Fellow Geraldine Dawson worked with a family that changed her life. They had an autistic child and “I was just captured by the experience and decided to devote my entire career to it,” Dawson told Autism Talk TV. Today, Dawson is a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as Chief Science Officer of Autism Speaks. She is recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism who has used brain imaging to analyze neural irregularities associated with the disease. She has also studied the genetics of autism and helped to pinpoint some of the earliest symptoms of the disorder.
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Emotion: The Emotion Wars
Psychology Today: Science, just like art, is subject to big shifts in the way we think about ourselves. For the past two decades, psychology has favored "inside" explanations of behavior: Who we are is largely determined by our makeup. We are hostages to our genes. But the cutting edge is now shifting. Evidence is amassing that the environment we inhabit shapes even what we thought was most fixed about ourselves. One orthodoxy of psychology in the past two decades has been that emotions are hardwired into us and their facial display is universal, and thus recognizable, across cultures. We just "read" the emotions that are written on a face.
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Celebrity Psychology: Amanda Bynes drives away from police
Examiner: As a Hollywood star from the TV sitcom What I Like About You alongside Jenny Garth and the musical Hairspray with John Travolta, Amanda Bynes is one celebrity that many fans think is a pretty good girl. With a squeaky clean image, Bynes has been put into a category of celebrities most would not easily visualize as someone that would skip out on the police. After a routine stop for using her cell phone while driving, Amanda drove off and eluded the cops in Los Angeles. While she did turn herself in later that day, she sure gave them a scare. What motived the young actress to do so? Read the whole story: Examiner
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Mind Changer and Game Changer
APS Past-President Elizabeth Loftus, University of California, Irving, is the highest-ranking female in the list of top 100 psychologists. She's gained world-wide renown for her experiments showing that memory, far from being an accurate record, is influenced by subsequent exposure to information and events and is re-constituted according to the biases these create. In the BBC series Mind Changers, Claudia Hammond discusses the impact of Loftus’ research and how it has revolutionized eyewitness testimony procedures and legal systems. Hammond speaks with other APS Fellows Barbara Tversky, Gordon Bower, Lee Ross, and Brian Wandell, as they reflect on the influence of her work.
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Now, seek the obscure to solve your problems
Yahoo India: A US researcher has come up a new technique that allows people to solve their problems systematically by using innovative ideas. According to Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts, there is a classic obstruction to innovation called 'functional fixedness'. "which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts. It hinders people from solving problems," McCaffrey said. McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the "generic parts technique" (GPT). Read the whole story: Yahoo India
