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How Others See Our Identity Depends on Moral Traits, Not Memory
We may view our memory as being essential to who we are, but new findings suggest that others consider our moral traits to be the core component of our identity. Data collected from family members of patients suffering from neurodegenerative disease showed that it was changes in moral behavior, not memory loss, that caused loved ones to say that the patient wasn't “the same person” anymore. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Contrary to what you might think -- and what generations of philosophers and psychologists have assumed -- memory loss itself doesn't make someone seem like a different person.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Costly Signaling Increases Trust, Even Across Religious Affiliations Deborah L. Hall, Adam B. Cohen, Kaitlin K. Meyer, Allison H. Varley, and Gene A. Brewer Cultures often have specific norms that members of the group are expected to follow. Although adherence to group norms generally increases within-group trust, it is not known how adherence to or violation of such norms is viewed by outgroup members. In a series of four studies, the authors examined costly signaling -- the performance of costly behaviors that communicate commitment to the group -- on perceptions of in-group and out-group trust.
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Parents’ Math Anxiety Can Undermine Children’s Math Achievement
If the thought of a math test makes you break out in a cold sweat, Mom or Dad may be partly to blame, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers led by University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year and were more likely to be math-anxious themselves—but only when these parents provided frequent help on the child’s math homework. Lead study author Erin A. Maloney is a postdoctoral scholar in psychology at UChicago. Gerardo Ramirez and Elizabeth A.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Capacity for Visual Features in Mental Rotation Yangqing Xu and Steven L. Franconeri Despite researchers' interest in mental rotation -- the ability of people to rotate the visual representation of objects in their mind -- there is still much we don't know about it. To learn more about this ability, the researchers performed a series of studies, some including eye tracking, in which participants were asked to mentally rotate simple objects with four differently colored parts. Participants were able to keep track of only one of the color-location feature links during the rotation task.
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Look Into My Pupils: Pupil Mimicry May Lead to Increased Trust
People often mimic each other’s facial expressions without even knowing it, but research shows that they also mimic the size of each other’s pupils.
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New Research in Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Genes Unite Executive Functions in Childhood Laura E. Engelhardt, Daniel A. Briley, Frank D. Mann, K. Paige Harden, and Elliot M. Tucker-Drob Research has shown that the covariation among abilities in different executive function (EF) domains -- represented by a higher-order factor -- is almost 100% heritable in adults; however, it is not known whether this genetic influence is in place in childhood. Third- through eighth-graders who were part of the Texas Twin Project -- a registry of twins and triplets living in the U.S.