-
Can’t Help Myself
The New York Times: Human consciousness, that wonderful ability to reflect, ponder and choose, is our greatest evolutionary achievement. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and fortunately we also have the ability to operate on automatic pilot, performing complex behaviors without any conscious thought at all. One way this happens is with lots of practice. Tasks that seem impossibly complex at first, like learning how to play the guitar, speak a foreign language or operate a new DVD player, become second nature after we perform those actions many times (well, maybe not the DVD player).
-
Suppressing Feelings of Compassion Makes People Feel Less Moral
It’s normal to not always act on your sense of compassion—for example, by walking past a beggar on the street without giving them any money. Maybe you want to save your money or avoid engaging with a homeless person. But even if suppressing compassion avoids these costs, it may carry a personal cost of its own, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. After people suppress compassionate feelings, an experiment shows, they lose a bit of their commitment to morality. Normally, people assume that ignoring their compassionate feeling doesn’t have any cost—that you can just suppress your sympathy and walk on.
-
Personality Can Change Over Time, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post: According to a new study, grouches don't necessarily remain grouches for the rest of their lives. Findings published in the journal Social Indicators Research suggest that people's personalities can change over time just as much as external factors like change in jobs or income, or marriage or divorce. The researchers, of the University of Manchester's School of Psychological Sciences, said that the findings indicate we can increase our well-being not just through these actual external changes, but also through changes in our personalities.
-
Partnersuche: Amor ist online
ORF: Onlinedatings werden immer beliebter. Mittlerweile lernen knapp 25 Prozent aller US-Amerikaner ihre Partner über das Internet kennen, wie eine Überblicksstudie zeigt. In Europa verläuft der Trend ähnlich. "Onlinedating hat den Mainstream erreicht. Und es verliert zusehends das soziale Stigma, mit dem es einst versehen war", schreiben Forscher um Harry Reis im Fachblatt "Psychological Science in the Public Interest". Der Psychologe von der University of Rochester hat mit seinen Kollegen mehr als 400 einschlägige Studien ausgewertet, sie zeichnen ein Bild des gesellschaftlichen Umbruchs. Read the whole story: ORF See Harry Reis at the 24th APS Annual Convention
-
Your Complicated Amygdala: Why Brain-Imaging Work Is Misleading
The Atlantic: Brain-imaging studies have been painting an overly-simplistic picture of the how the brain works. It has even filtered into TV programming. In one episode of a popular legal drama, a character claimed to have figured out that a policeman was racist because his amygdala activated whenever he was shown pictures of black people, demonstrating his fear of them. This simplified picture troubles many cognitive researchers, including Dr. William A. Cunningham of Ohio State University. It's true that the amygdala becomes increasingly active when people are afraid, but that's far from the whole story.
-
How will your personality change as you age?
Business Insider: People show increased self-confidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability with age." Recent longitudinal and cross-sectional aging research has shown that personality traits continue to change in adulthood. In this article, we review the evidence for mean-level change in personality traits, as well as for individual differences in change across the life span. In terms of mean-level change, people show increased self-confidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability with age. These changes predominate in young adulthood (age 20–40).
