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Practical Wisdom
Everywhere we turn these days, we are confronted with a dizzying array of choices, whether we’re shopping at the supermarket or searching for a first home. Barry Schwartz’s research investigates the decision-making processes that underlie our choices and examines how our choices make us feel. Schwartz’s research has shown that, rather than making us feel better, having more freedom and choice often makes us feel worse. Specifically, the expectation of choice may cause us to question our choices before we make them and can lead us to be disappointed with them afterward.
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Giving Science Its Due
One of the early advocates of using quantitative methods in psychology, James McKeen Cattell studied under William Wundt, the “father” of experimental psychology, in Germany. Cattell, the first professor of psychology in the United States, was interested in the quantitative measurement of intelligence. His goals led him to pursue classic studies looking at differences between individuals’ reaction times during simple mental tasks, such as naming colors.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Natural-Scene Perception Requires Attention Michael A. Cohen, George A. Alvarez, and Ken Nakayama Many studies have indicated that visual awareness can occur in the absence of attention, but this new study contradicts those findings. Participants were asked to complete two tasks: one in which they visually tracked moving discs and another in which they tracked a specific number in a stream of numbers and letters. In each task, a natural scene (e.g., a mountain) appeared in the background during the final trial.
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Is Violence History?
The New York Times: It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker's “Better Angels of Our Nature” tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of "The Language Instinct"' addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad? Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? Do we have grounds for being optimistic about the future? If that sounds like a book you would want to read, wait, there’s more. In 800 information-packed pages, Pinker also discusses a host of more specific issues.
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Can You Really Wash Away Your Troubles?
Huffington Post: It might really be possible to wash your troubles away. A new review of studies published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science shows that the act of washing yourself, including religious rites such as baptism, really holds psychological power. Just washing your hands or taking a shower can help people to "rid themselves of a sense of immorality, lucky or unlucky feelings, or doubt about a decision," study researcher Spike W.S. Lee, of the University of Michigan, said in a statement. "The bodily experience of removing physical residues can provide the basis of removing more abstract mental residues." Read the whole story: Huffington Post
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Musik verbessert die Sprachfähigkeit
Suddeutsche Zeitung: Eine Studie aus Kanada könnte den Ehrgeiz vieler Eltern anfeuern. Demnach steigertMusikunterricht nicht nur die musischen Fähigkeiten, sondern auch das Sprachvermögen von Kindern. Das berichtet der Neurowissenschaftler Sylvain Moreno im Fachmagazin Psychological Science (online). Der Forscher des Rotman Research Institute in Ontario prüfte mit einem Intelligenztest für Vorschulkinder das räumliche Vorstellungsvermögen sowie die verbalen Fertigkeiten von Vier- bis Sechsjährigen. Read the full story: Suddeutsche Zeitung
