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News in Brief: Association for Psychological Science meeting
ScienceNews: Familiarity breeds congeniality Snap judgments about others sometimes depend not on what the person looks like but on whom they look like. Women tend to preferentially like male strangers who facially resemble the woman’s romantic partner, psychologist Gül Günaydin of Cornell University reported May 27. This type of social attraction often occurs unconsciously, Günaydin’s team found. For unclear reasons, men showed no signs of especially liking women who resembled a romantic partner. Members of 30 romantic couples observed opposite-sex strangers’ faces for half a second on a computer screen. Some faces were digitally altered to resemble the volunteers’ partners.
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El ejercicio mental que de verdad aumenta la inteligencia
ABC Espana: Ni autodefinidos, ni sudokus, ni música de Mozart ni lo último en complicados juegos electrónicos. La mejor manera de entrenar nuestro cerebro para aumentar realmente nuestra inteligencia es un pequeño ejercicio llamado «entrenamiento n-back», según concluye un estudio de la Universidad de Michigan. Básicamente, la tarea consiste en recordar las posiciones de una figura que se mueve de forma cíclica en una pantalla, y los investigadores aseguran que su práctica 20 minutos diarios durante 20 días mejora los resultados en una prueba de inteligencia. Al parecer, aumenta la capacidad de razonar y de resolver nuevos problemas, una mejoría que se prolonga al menos durante tres meses.
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Feel Great, Meditate
We all know that levitating off the ground when you meditate is just a myth, but there is lots of scientific research to back-up the idea that meditation can improve our lives. At the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Katherine MacLean of the University of California, Davis, Bethany Kok of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Catherine Ortner of Thompson Rivers University in Canada, and Matthew Hunsinger from Mary Baldwin College led a symposia on the affective, cognitive, and social benefits of meditation.
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News from Psychological Science: A Conversation Between David Brooks and Walter Mischel
David Brooks is a featured New York Times columnist and a regular on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In his NY Times columns "Social Science Palooza" I and II, he summarized examples of recent findings in the scholarly study of human behavior and concluded, "A day without social science is like a day without sunshine." In this conversation hour, Brooks and social psychology legend Walter Mischel talked about what's exciting them in psychological science and why it matters outside the academy.
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Depression and Negative Thoughts
We all have our ups and downs—a fight with a friend, a divorce, the loss of a parent. But most of us get over it. Only some go on to develop major depression. Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests part of the reason may be that people with depression get stuck on bad thoughts because they’re unable to turn their attention away. People who don’t recover from negative events seem to keep going over their troubles. “They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again,” says Jutta Joormann, of the University of Miami.
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Your Name Impacts How Others Judge You
LiveScience: Alexandra will get an A in class but Amber won't. At least, that's what their peers expect, according to a small new study of the meanings encoded in people's names. "The name you give your kid is sort of a proxy for a whole bunch of things in our culture," study researcher John Waggoner of Bloomberg University of Pennsylvania told LiveScience. Names have been linked to many life choices, including what kind of work people do and how they donate to charity. Previous studies have shown that what people name their children varies by their socioeconomic status and education level. Waggoner and his colleagues wondered if people's names affect what others expect of them.
