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Thinking about Death, East and West
It's unsettling to think about our own death, which is why we have ways to protect our sense of self when we're reminded of our mortality. For example, research has found that we become more critical of those who aren't like us when we have death in mind. However, a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science found that there are cultural differences in these protective responses, specifically between Asian and European Americans. In a first study, European-Americans and Asian-Americans either had to write about their own death or about dental pain (the control group).
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What Do We Pay Attention To?
Once we learn the relationship between a cue and its consequences—say, the sound of a bell and the appearance of the white ice cream truck bearing our favorite chocolate cone—do we turn our attention to that bell whenever we hear it? Or do we tuck the information away and marshal our resources to learning other, novel cues—a recorded jingle, or a blue truck? Psychologists observing “attentional allocation” now agree that the answer is both, and they have arrived at two principles to describe the phenomena. The “predictive” principle says we search for meaningful—important—cues amid the “noise” of our environments.
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Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look
The New York Times: It was less than 20 years ago that the National Institutes of Health abruptly withdrew funds for a conference on genetics and crime after outraged complaints that the idea smacked of eugenics. The president of the Association of Black Psychologists at the time declared that such research was in itself “a blatant form of stereotyping and racism.” The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns.
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The Myth of the ‘Queen Bee’: Work and Sexism
Researchers wondered if the “queen bee” behavior—refusing to help other women and denying that gender discrimination is a problem, for example—might be a response to a difficult, male-dominated environment.
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Why Seeing (The Unexpected) Is Often Not Believing
NPR: Two months ago, on a wooded path in upstate New York, a psychologist named Chris Chabris strapped a video camera to a 20-year-old man and told him to chase after a jogger making his way down the path. For close to two years Chabris, who teaches at Union College, had been conducting this same experiment. He did the experiment at night, in the afternoon, with women, with men. All were told to run after the jogger and watch him. The goal of all this was to answer a question: Is it possible to see something really, really obvious and not perceive it?
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(Inherently) Scared of Red
What do you think of when you see the color red? Danger, blood, passion, and…dominance, new research suggests. A study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science found that that there is evolutionary basis to the human tendency to avoid the color red or act submissively in its presence. In this study, experimenters looked at male rhesus macaques, a species of monkeys that is sensitive to the colors red, green, and blue, in their natural environment. The female and male experimenters would approach the monkeys at the same time, in the same manner, place a slice of apple in front of them, and then take two simultaneous steps back.
