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Not All Mind Wandering Is Created Equal
Mind wandering—sometimes seen as daydreaming or “zoning out”—has been shown to facilitate creative thinking and problem solving, but in the wrong context it can become distracting or even dangerous. Inattentive students can get behind in class, and drivers who aren’t paying attention to the road are far more likely to end up in accidents. And for some professions, like surgeons or air traffic controllers, zoning out on the job can lead to disaster.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: I Think, Therefore Eyeblink: The Importance of Contingency Awareness in Conditioning Gabrielle Weidemann, Michelle Satkunarajah, and Peter F. Lovibond Associative learning in humans is thought to be able to occur both unconsciously and consciously; however, studies of this dual-system for learning have produced conflicting results. Participants performed a conditioning task in which one of several stimuli was paired with a puff of air. Researchers manipulated how much information they gave participants about the pairing, giving them no information, some information, or detailed information.
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Seeing Isn’t Required to Gesture Like a Native Speaker
People the world over gesture when they talk, and they tend to gesture in certain ways depending on the language they speak. Findings from a new study including blind and sighted participants suggest that these gestural variations do not emerge from watching other speakers make the gestures, but from learning the language itself. “Adult speakers who are blind from birth also gesture when they talk, and these gestures resemble the gestures of sighted adults speaking the same language.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: To Live Among Like-Minded Others: Exploring the Links Between Person-City Personality Fit and Self-Esteem Wiebke Bleidorn, Felix Schönbrodt, Jochen E. Gebauer, Peter J. Rentfrow, Jeff Potter, and Samuel D. Gosling Does it matter if your personality meshes with the personality of the city in which you live? More than 500,000 participants from 860 cities across the United States were assessed for their Big Five personality traits, religiosity, and self-esteem. City-level personality was calculated from the personality scores for each trait within each city.
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Where We Live Affects Our Bias Against Mixed-Race Individuals
Whites living in areas where they are less exposed to people of other races have a harder time categorizing mixed-race individuals than do Whites with greater interracial exposure, a condition that is associated with greater
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new articles published in Clinical Psychological Science are part of the forthcoming special series "Dissecting Antisocial Behavior: The Impact of Neural, Genetic, and Environmental Factors": Polygenic Risk for Externalizing Psychopathology and Executive Dysfunction in Trauma-Exposed Veterans Naomi Sadeh, Erika J. Wolf, Mark W. Logue, Joanna Lusk, Jasmeet P. Hayes, Regina E. McGlinchey, William P. Milberg, Annjanette Stone, Steven A. Schichman, and Mark W. Miller Although studies have indicated that externalizing problems are highly heritable, it has become apparent that this heritability is likely polygenic in nature.
