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Paying Do-Gooders Makes Them Less Persuasive
People who receive a financial incentive to raise money for a charity they care about are actually less effective in soliciting donations, even when potential donors have no idea that incentives were involved.
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Motivating Eco-Friendly Behaviors Depends on Cultural Values
The specific cultural values of a country may determine whether concern about environmental issues actually leads individuals to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Backward Semantic Inhibition in Toddlers Janette Chow, Anne M. Aimola Davies, Luis J. Fuentes, and Kim Plunkett Studies in adults have suggested that backward inhibition, or inhibition of an initial stimulus, occurs when the next stimulus belongs to a different category of semantic representation (e.g., switching from the word "dog" to the word "sea"). Backward inhibition leads to inhibition not only of the previously attended item (dog) but also of new items semantically related to the previous item (e.g., cat).
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Why We Fall Prey to Misinformation
Even when we know better, we often rely on inaccurate or misleading information to make future decisions. A review of scientific research explores the reasons why.
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Sleep Makes Relearning Faster and Longer-Lasting
Sleeping between study sessions may make it easier to recall what you studied and relearn what you forgot, with lasting results.
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Babies’ Spatial Reasoning Predicts Later Math Skills
Spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at math at four years of age, according to findings from a longitudinal study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We’ve provided the earliest documented evidence for a relationship between spatial reasoning and math ability,” says Emory University psychological scientist Stella Lourenco, whose lab conducted the research. “We’ve shown that spatial reasoning beginning early in life, as young as six months of age, predicts both the continuity of this ability and mathematical development.” Emory graduate student Jillian Lauer is co-author of the study.
