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Are you Superman or Voldemort? Avatars may affect the real you
CNET: Video games have long provided a safe way for players to try out different personalities. In the land of pixels and pretend, we can try out the role of lithe, attractive do-gooder elf or become a hideous orc who leaves a trail of havoc (and dead elves) in our wake. Most of us probably assume that after the game is over, we return to being simple boyfriends, moms, teachers, or accountants operating according to our own moral principles, regardless of the virtual personas we took on. New research, however, indicates that this just might not be the case.
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Can Shame Predict Whether a Released Felon Will Reoffend?
Pacific Standard: The linguistic distinction between guilt and shame is often blurred. Some of the definitions that Merriam-Webster offers are nearly identical. Guilt is “a bad feeling caused by knowing or thinking that you have done something bad or wrong,” while shame is “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.” In their unending preoccupation with darkness, psychological researchers prefer to parse the details. “Shame and guilt are both self-conscious emotions that arise from self-relevant failures and transgressions, but they differ in their object of evaluation,” a new paper in Psychological Science declares.
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Talking About Social Class Boosts Grades of First-Generation College Students
A novel one-hour intervention focused on discussions of social class can significantly narrow the achievement gap between first-generation college students and students who have a least one parent with a college degree, researchers find. The study is forthcoming Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The key to the one-time intervention’s success was raising students’ awareness of the ways that social class shapes the college experience, according to Northwestern psychological scientist Nicole Stephens.
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How Your Culture Affects Your Work Attitude
After claiming to have fostered a million marriages, eHarmony is extending its online dating formula to employee recruitment, helping job-hunters and employers find the perfect match. It may be a stretch to liken a great job to a soulmate. But just as eHarmony tests potential matches on various dimensions of compatibility, so do organizational psychologists identify the seeds of an optimal employee-employer relationship. Researchers have amassed decades worth of data showing what makes a professional “match made in heaven.” They refer to this measure as person-environment (P-E) fit — the degree of compatibility between individuals and some aspect of their work environment.
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The Brain-Training Secrets Of Olympic Athletes
The Huffington Post: With the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics well underway, millions of spectators are marveling at the physical skill and talent of the athletes competing in the Games. But behind these athletes' physical feats is an arguably even more impressive mental prowess cultivated through years of training the mind to tune out distractions, reduce stress and anxiety and build the focus and stamina they need to achieve optimal performance. In fact, it's not a stretch to say that great athletes succeed because they know how to stay at the top of their game mentally.
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Feel the Noise
National Geographic: If you’ve ever clenched up at the sound of nails on a chalkboard, or felt a pleasant chill when listening to an opera soprano, then you have an intuitive sense of the way our brains sometimes mix information from our senses. For the latest issue of Nautilus magazine I wrote a story about a woman whose brain mixes more than most, allowing her to feel many types of sounds on her skin. Over the past decade or so, neuroscientists have revamped their view of how the brain processes sensory information. According to the traditional model, the cortex, or outer layers of the brain, processes only one sense at a time.
