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Income disparity causes unhappiness – study
Reuters: As the rich get richer and the poor fall further behind, levels of happiness and satisfaction drop, but only among people with modest and lower incomes, a new study shows. The finding holds true for about 60 percent of Americans, according to research that will be published in the journal Psychological Science. "Income disparity has grown a lot in the U.S., especially since the 1980s. With that, we've seen a marked drop in life satisfaction and happiness," said Shigehiro Oishi, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. Read more: Reuters
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Smell of Success: Scents Affect Thoughts, Behaviors
LiveScience: WASHINGTON — Suit pressed, mind ready and resume in hand. When preparing for a job interview, most people take every precaution to convey the best impression possible. But aside from body odor, not many people pay attention to the odors that surround them. That onion-laden lunch could give your potential boss-to-be the wrong impression, according to new research presented in May at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting. "There's a lot of research that's begun now, where people are looking at how the environment affects our well-being," said Jeannette Haviland-Jones, of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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Anxiety makes searchers miss multiple objects
Times of India: A new study has found that a person scanning baggage or X-rays can miss out on multiple objects during searches if they were feeling anxious. Duke psychologists put a dozen students through a test in which they searched for particular shapes on a computer display, simulating the sort of visual searching performed by airport security teams and radiologists. Stephen Mitroff, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience who led the experiment, says this area of cognitive psychology is important for improving homeland security and healthcare. Read the whole story: Times of India
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Exploring the Dynamic Interaction Between Genes, Environment and the Brain
A Symposium on Epigenetics at the 3rd Scientific Meeting of the ESN 8 September 2011 in Basel, Switzerland Cosponsored by the Association for Psychological Science and the Federation of the European Societies of Neuropsychology With modern advances in a number of scientific disciplines, we have moved from looking at genetic versus environmental factors to looking at the interplay between these factors in understanding individual differences in behavior. In the process of development, the expression of genes is shaped by environmental experience, producing stable changes in individual characteristics that can persist within and across generations.
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Can Aptitude Tests Really Predict Your Performance?
Colleges, employers, and the military all use aptitude tests to predict how well someone might do. In recent years, some critics of these tests have said there isn’t much difference in performance above a certain level—that, above a certain threshold, everyone is more or less the same. Now, in a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the authors find that this isn’t true. Instead, the higher your score, the better you perform later. But some critics have said that the tests aren’t much use at the top end of the scale.
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Imagination Can Influence Perception
Imagining something with our mind’s eye is a task we engage in frequently, whether we’re daydreaming, conjuring up the face of a childhood friend, or trying to figure out exactly where we might have parked the car. But how can we tell whether our own mental images are accurate or vivid when we have no direct comparison? That is, how do we come to know and judge the contents of our own minds? Mental imagery is typically thought to be a private phenomenon, which makes it difficult to test people’s metacognition of – or knowledge about –their own mental imagery.
