-
Encountering Connections May Make Life Feel More Meaningful
Experiencing connections, regularities, and coherence in their environment may lead people to feel a greater sense of meaning in life, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, conducted by graduate student Samantha Heintzelman of the University of Missouri, along with advisor Laura King and fellow graduate student Jason Trent, suggests that meaning in life has an important adaptive function, connecting people to the world that surrounds them and, thereby, boosting their chances of survival. “Meaning in life tells the individual when the world is making sense,” say Heintzelman and colleagues.
-
Extreme Political Attitudes May Stem From an Illusion of Understanding
Having to explain how a political policy works leads people to express less extreme attitudes toward the policy, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research suggests that people may hold extreme policy positions because they are under an illusion of understanding -- attempting to explain the nuts and bolts of how a policy works forces them to acknowledge that they don’t know as much about the policy as they initially thought.
-
New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science. Attentional Capture Does Not Depend on Feature Similarity, but on Target-Nontarget Relations Stefanie I. Becker, Charles L. Folk, and Roger W. Remington What determines which part of a scene will be visually selected? Most top-down accounts suggest that once a target feature (e.g., color) is selected, items most similar to this feature should attract attention. However, according to a new relational account, the visual system can evaluate the relationship between the target feature and the feature of irrelevant nontarget items and direct attention toward items with the same relationship.
-
Infants’ Sweat Response Predicts Aggressive Behavior as Toddlers
Infants who sweat less in response to scary situations at age 1 show more physical and verbal aggression at age 3, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Lower levels of sweat, as measured by skin conductance activity (SCA), have been linked with conduct disorder and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. Researchers hypothesize that aggressive children may not experience as strong of an emotional response to fearful situations as their less aggressive peers do; because they have a weaker fear response, they are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.
-
Green Spaces May Boost Well-Being for City Slickers
People who live in urban areas with more green space tend to report greater well-being than city dwellers who don’t have parks, gardens, or other green space nearby, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Examining data from a national longitudinal survey of households in the United Kingdom, Mathew White and colleagues at the European Centre for Environment & Human Health at the University of Exeter Medical School found that individuals reported less mental distress and higher life satisfaction when they were living in greener areas.
-
New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Lip Movements Affect Infants' Audiovisual Speech Perception H. Henny Yeung and Janet F. Werker Although research has suggested that audio-visual speech perception is linked to articulatory movements in adults, no studies have examined this link in infants. Infants performed an audiovisual matching procedure while making lip movements similar or different from those seen in the task. Infants' looking patterns were biased away from audiovisually matching faces when they made lip movements similar to those needed to produce the heard vowel.
