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Mo’mimicry, mo’problems
Financial Post: What is a little money between friends? According to new research, at the very least, it's not going to stimulate bonding. Researchers have longknown mimicry strengthens social bonding between strangers. By subtly imitating a person's posture or gestures, you can create goodwill. But a new study looking at the psychological effects of money on our behaviour suggests this does not apply when money is involved. Mimic someone and he'll feel a warm glow; but mimic someone while he's being reminded of money and he'll feel threatened. Read more: Financial Post
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Cook: The importance of trusting your instincts
Statesman: Are humans liberal or conservative by nature? Scientists have started to provide provocative answers by looking at the roots of morality. Influential psychologist Jonathan Haidt surveyed the world's cultures and suggested that virtually everyone is born with an innate propensity for five broad moral instincts: fairness, not harming others, loyalty to one's group, respecting authority and purity. And in psychological experiments, conservatives value all five of the instincts, yet liberals tend to put far more weight on the first two — fairness and not doing harm — while discounting the other three. It is easy to see how those play out in our political life.
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2 Ways to cope with negative emotions
The Times of India: When confronted with high-intensity negative emotions, they tend to choose to turn their attention away, but with something lower-intensity, they tend to think it over and neutralize the feeling that way. Emotions are useful for example, fear tells your body to get ready to escape or fight in a dangerous situation. But emotions can also become problematic for example, for people with depression who can't stop thinking about negative thoughts, said Gal Sheppes of Stanford University, who co-wrote the study with Stanford colleagues Gaurav Suri and James J. Gross, and Susanne Scheibe of the University of Groningen. Read more: The Times of India
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Up, Down, Right, Left – How Visual Cues Help Us Understand Bodily Motion
“Our visual system is tuned towards perceiving other people. We spend so much time doing that—seeing who they are, what they are doing, what they intend to do,” says psychology professor Nikolaus F. Troje of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. This process is called biological motion perception, and humans are so good at it that even a few dots on a screen representing the major joints of a body are enough to retrieve all the information we need—as long as they move. But what role does motion play in that process? Does the visual system use it only to connect the dots to create a coherent, or “global,” structure? Troje and his colleagues—Masahiro Hirai and Daniel R.
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Distract Yourself or Think It Over? Two Ways to Deal with Negative Emotions
A big part of coping with life is having a flexible reaction to the ups and downs. Now, a study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people choose to respond differently depending on how intense an emotion is. When confronted with high-intensity negative emotions, they tend to choose to turn their attention away, but with something lower-intensity, they tend to think it over and neutralize the feeling that way. Emotions are useful—for example, fear tells your body to get ready to escape or fight in a dangerous situation.
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When It Comes to Memory, Practice Seems to Make Perfect
U.S. News & World Report: A new study shows that just a bit of practice can give a certain type of learning remarkable staying power. Over two consecutive days, volunteers were asked to identify a specific face or pattern from a larger group of images. They found it difficult at first but their ability improved with practice. When they were tested again one to two years later, the participants were able to retain specific information about those faces and patterns. The study, conducted by researchers at McMaster University in Canada, was published in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science. Read more: U.S. News & World Report
