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Acetaminophen May Reduce Both Pain and Pleasure
The commonly used pain reliever acetaminophen may have a previously unknown side effect: Blunting positive emotions.
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Shakespeare’s Plays Reveal His Psychological Signature
Shakespeare is such a towering literary figure that any new insight into the man, or his work, tends to generate a jolt of excitement in academic and non-academic communities of Shakespeare aficionados. Applying psychological theory and text-analyzing software, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have discovered a unique psychological profile that characterizes Shakespeare’s established works, and this profile strongly identifies Shakespeare as an author of the long-contested play Double Falsehood. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Extraversion May Be Less Common Than We Think
Social scientists have long known that, statistically speaking, our friends are more popular than we are. It’s a simple matter of math: Because popular people have more friends, they are disproportionately represented in social networks—which guarantees that on average, our friends have more friends than we do. New research by researchers Daniel C. Feiler and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College extends this so-called "friendship paradox" with a study of personality, documenting a “network extraversion bias” within the emerging social networks of a new class of MBA students.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: An Event-Based Account of Conformity Diana Kim and Bernhard Hommel Why do people conform to the behaviors and judgments of others? In two sessions, female participants rated the attractiveness of faces on a scale of 1 to 8. In the first session only, after each picture, participants were shown a number or a short video clip of someone pushing a number button. Participants' attractiveness ratings in the second session were influenced by the number and video presentations shown in the first rating session. The authors posit that actions people take and the events they perceive are coded in a common format.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Illusory Feature Slowing: Evidence for Perceptual Models of Global Facial Change Richard Cook, Clarisse Aichelburg, and Alan Johnston Much of the research examining face perception has studied static faces; there is less research examining how we process faces in motion. Participants viewed two faces: a standard face that was presented in an upright or an inverted position and a comparison face that was always presented upright. The eyes and the mouth of the standard face opened and closed, while only the eyes on the comparison face moved.
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Teenagers Shape Each Other’s Views on How Risky a Situation Is
Young adolescents’ judgments on how risky a situation might be are most influenced by what other teenagers think, while most other age groups are more influenced by adults’ views, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychology researchers at University College London (UCL) asked 563 visitors to the London Science Museum to rate the riskiness of everyday situations such as crossing a road on a red light or taking a shortcut through a dark alley. Ratings were given on a continuous scale from low to high risk, and children (aged 8-11) generally rated situations as more risky than all other age groups.
