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Racial Essentialism Reduces Creative Thinking By Making People More Closed-Minded
New research suggests that racial stereotypes and creativity have more in common than we might think. In an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University and colleagues find that racial stereotyping and creative stagnation share a common mechanism: categorical thinking. “Although these two concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when people fixate on existing category information and conventional mindsets,” Tadmor and her colleagues write.
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Let’s Make a Deal: The Psychological Science Underlying Compromise and Negotiation
Tense negotiations in Congress over the “fiscal cliff” have focused public attention on the art of compromise -- or lack thereof. From deciding who washes the dishes to figuring out how to avoid the fiscal cliff, life experience shows us that achieving compromise is rarely easy. But why is give and take so difficult even when the consequences of failure are dire? We may like to believe that we are fair and levelheaded negotiators, but science tells us that successful give and take is often more difficult than we anticipate.
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New Research on Visual Perception and Attention From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on visual perception and attention from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. When What You Hear Influences When You See: Listening to an Auditory Rhythm Influences the Temporal Allocation of Visual Attention Jared E. Miller, Laura A. Carlson, and J. Devin McAuley Can the things we hear affect the ways we allocate visual attention? In the first of three experiments, participants watched a screen while listening to an auditory rhythm. A white dot appeared in a corner of the screen in synch, slightly out of synch, or very out of synch with the final auditory tone.
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Monkey See, Monkey Do: Visual Feedback Is Necessary for Imitating Facial Expressions
Research using new technology shows that our ability to imitate facial expressions depends on learning that occurs through visual feedback. Studies of the chameleon effect confirm what salespeople, tricksters, and Lotharios have long known: Imitating another person’s postures and expressions is an important social lubricant. But how do we learn to imitate with any accuracy when we can’t see our own facial expressions and we can’t feel the facial expressions of others?
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New Research on Emotion From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on emotion from Psychological Science. The Emotionally Intelligent Decision Maker: Emotion-Understanding Ability Reduces the Effect of Incidental Anxiety on Risk Taking Jeremy A. Yip and Stéphane Côté Can understanding the source of your emotions help you make better decisions? Participants were assessed for ability to understand emotions and were then told they would have to give a video-recorded speech (incidental anxiety condition) or prepare a grocery list (neutral condition). Each participant's level of risk taking was then measured.
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Experiencing Discrimination Increases Risk-Taking, Anger, and Vigilance
Experiencing rejection not only affects how we think and feel -- over the long-term it can also influence our physical and mental health. New research suggests that when rejection comes in the form of discrimination, people respond with a pattern of thoughts, behaviors, and physiological responses that may contribute to overall health disparities. “Psychological factors, like discrimination, have been suggested as part of the causal mechanisms that explain how discrimination gets ‘under the skin’ to affect health,” says psychological scientist and senior researcher Wendy Berry Mendes of the University of California, San Francisco.
