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Study discovers the ordinary psycho
New Zealand Herald: There's more to psychopaths than being murderous. They aren't all as smart as Hannibal Lecter, or evil, and they can change, say researchers. Victoria University Associate Professor Devon Polaschek, one of four authors of research about to be published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, says psychopaths of the popular imagination give the personality disorder a bad name. Patrick Bateman in the film American Psycho inserts a chainsaw into a prostitute. Alex in A Clockwork Orange fantasises about torture and slaughter while listening to music. But psychopaths can wreak havoc in workplaces without stabbing, or eating, their colleagues.
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Research States That Prejudice Comes From a Basic Human Need and Way of Thinking
Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others. In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice since the 1954 publication of an influential book, The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.
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Left-leaning estimations
The Globe and Mail: “If something has gone down in your estimation, check your stance,” says the New Scientist. “Leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate everything from the height of buildings to the number of Michael Jackson chart-toppers. To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while [standing] on a Wii-console balance board.
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Does having more potential mates make us focus on deep qualities or shallow ones?
Business Insider: A study published in Psychological Science found that volunteers who have the choice of many potential mates pay less attention to important characteristics that take more time to elicit and pay more attention to trivial characteristics that are quickly and easily assessed. ...Results found that in small speed-dating sessions, people made choices based primarily on important characteristics that take more time to evaluate while those in large speed-dating sessions made choices based on quick and easy-to-assess characteristics. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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26th Conference of the EHPS
The 26th Conference of the European Health Psychology Society will be held August 21st-25th, 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic. For more information visit: http://www.ehps.net/index.php/Conferences/ehps-conferences.html
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Ergonomics & Human Factors
Ergonomics & Human Factors 2012 will be held April 16-19, 2012, Blackpool, UK. For more information visit: http://www.ergonomics.org.uk/events/ehf2012
