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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: It's All in the Family: Brain Asymmetry and Syntactic Processing of Word Class Chia-lin Lee and Kara D. Federmeier The specialization of the left hemisphere for language processing is considered to be one of the key examples of functional lateralization in the brain; however, studies now indicate that the right hemisphere may play a larger role in language than was once assumed. Electroencephalographic data were collected as right-handed participants judged the grammaticality of phrases presented in the left or right visual field.
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Kids’ Altruism Linked with Better Physiological Regulation, Less Family Wealth
Children as young as 4 years old may reap better health from altruistic giving, a behavior that tends to be less common among kids from high-income families.
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Weakening Memories of Crime through Deliberate Suppression
There are some bad memories — whether of a crime or a painful life event — that we’d rather not recall. New research shows that people can successfully inhibit some incriminating memories, reducing the memories’ impact on automatic behaviors and resulting in brain activity similar to that seen in “innocent” participants. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “In real life, many individuals who take memory detection tests want to distort their results.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Money Earlier or Later? Simple Heuristics Explain Intertemporal Choices Better Than Delay Discounting Does Keith M. Marzilli Ericson, John Myles White, David Laibson, and Jonathan D. Cohen People frequently make decisions that have both short- and long-term consequences. These decisions -- called intertemporal choices -- have often been explained using delay-discounting models; however, these models have not always accounted for some of the behaviors seen in decision-making experiments. The authors hypothesized that models based on heuristics may provide a superior way to account for performance on discounting tasks.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Folk Explanations of Behavior: A Specialized Use of a Domain-General Mechanism Robert P. Spunt and Ralph Adolphs Do people use similar or different cognitive processes when making sense of social and nonsocial events? Participants' brain activity was measured while they completed a task in which they answered attributional and factual yes/no questions about the content of social images (emotional expressions and intentional hand actions) and nonsocial images (weather- and season-related).
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Hiding Your True Colors May Make You Feel Morally Tainted
The advice, whether from Shakespeare or a modern self-help guru, is common: Be true to yourself. New research suggests that this drive for authenticity — living in accordance with our sense of self, emotions, and values — may be so fundamental that we actually feel immoral and impure when we violate our true sense of self. This sense of impurity, in turn, may lead us to engage in cleansing or charitable behaviors as a way of clearing our conscience. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
