-
Psicologia: Facebook insidia per chi ha scarsa autostima
Yahoo Italia: Facebook è per molti, ma non per tutti. Il social network dei record, infatti, è controindicato per le persone con scarsa autostima. Secondo uno studio pubblicato su 'Psychological Science', infatti, questo tipo di cybernauti finisce per bombardare gli amici online con messaggi negativi sulla propria vita, rendendosi sgradevole senza rendersene conto. "Pensavamo che Facebook potesse essere un posto fantastico per le persone, uno spazio per rafforzare le relazioni", spiega Amanda Forest dell'University of Waterloo, coautrice della ricerca insieme a Joanne Woo. Anche perché "chi soffre di scarsa autostima spesso è a disagio nelle relazioni faccia a faccia", spiega.
-
Even Babies Know What's Fair
At a playground, it’s not uncommon to hear the refrain, “That’s not fair!” It seems that young children worry a lot about fairness, but psychological scientists have typically assumed that kids don’t start to understand morality until they reach their preschool years. New research, however, on 19- to 21-month-olds has indicated that sensitivity to fairness might begin a lot earlier. and her colleagues performed two experiments designed to test infants’ sense of fairness. The first experiment involved a female experimenter giving toy ducks, cookies, or toy cars to giraffe puppets. In one trial, the experimenter distributed the goodies equally between the two puppets.
-
Right Hand or Left? How the Brain Solves a Perceptual Puzzle
When you see a picture of a hand, how do you know whether it’s a right or left hand? This “hand laterality” problem may seem obscure, but it reveals a lot about how the brain sorts out confusing perceptions. Now, a study which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the long-held consensus about how we solve this problem. “For decades, the theory was that you use your motor imagination,” says Shivakumar Viswanathan, who conducted the study with University of California Santa Barbara colleagues Courtney Fritz and Scott T. Grafton.
-
A New Future for Clinical Science
Richard McFall’s work has spanned several areas of research including social competence and information processing, psychopathology, and classical conditioning. Throughout his career he has demonstrated a commitment to the use of scientifically valid techniques and treatments. In his Manifesto For A Science of Clinical Psychology he outlined his views on the importance of the integration of science and practice, both in the field, and in the training of the next generation of clinicians. His Manifesto was an instrumental call to action that led to the creation of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science (APCS) and McFall served as its founding president.
-
Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds
The Guardian: Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media. A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory. Read the full story: The Guardian
-
Irreconcilable differences links
Boston Globe: Additional reading (and listening) on the "irreconcilable differences" of politics, football, and Tweet seats, for those who are interested. This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explores the research of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt (pronounced like "height") made his name arguing that intuition, not reason, drives moral judgments. People are more like lawyers building a case for their gut feelings than judges reasoning toward truth. How much of moral thinking is innate? Haidt sees morality as a "social construction" that varies by time and place.
