-
How Same-Sex Couples Divide Chores, and What It Reveals About Modern Parenting
When straight couples divide up the chores of daily life — who cooks dinner and who mows the lawn, who schedules the children’s activities and who takes out the trash — the duties are often determined by gender. Same-sex couples, research has consistently found, divide up chores more equally. But recent research has uncovered a twist. When gay and lesbian couples have children, they often begin to divide things as heterosexual couples do, according to new data for larger, more representative samples of the gay population. Though the couples are still more equitable, one partner often has higher earnings, and one a greater share of household chores and child care.
-
New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Quantifying Inhibitory Control as Externalizing Proneness: A Cross-Domain Model Noah C. Venables, Jens Foell, James R. Yancey, Michael J. Kane, Randall W. Engle, and Christopher J. Patrick The capacity to resist impulses (i.e., inhibitory control) is an individual difference that affects behavior and health. To better understand the basis of inhibitory control, the authors propose a cross-domain measurement model employing psychometric self-report measures, behavioral-task measures, and brain response measures.
-
How Social Media Is Hurting Your Memory
Each day, hundreds of millions of people document and share their experiences on social media, from packed parties to the most intimate family moments. Social platforms let us stay in touch with friends and forge new relationships like never before, but those increases in communication and social connection may come at a cost. In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers showed that those who documented and shared their experiences on social media formed less precise memories of those events.
-
Study: Mental conditioning with cute animal pictures can rekindle your relationship
James K. McNulty of Florida State University and his team of psychological scientists were not expecting this. They’d wondered if they could use conditioning to warm the hearts of married couples gone a little cold from numbing day to day life by building associations between spouses’ faces and pictures of adorable puppies and bunnies. “I was actually a little surprised that it worked,” McNulty tells APS, a publication of the Association of Psychological Science.
-
Why our facial expressions don’t reflect our feelings
While conducting research on emotions and facial expressions in Papua New Guinea in 2015, psychologist Carlos Crivelli discovered something startling. He showed Trobriand Islanders photographs of the standard Western face of fear – wide-eyed, mouth agape – and asked them to identify what they saw. The Trobrianders didn’t see a frightened face. Instead, they saw an indication of threat and aggression. In other words, what we think of as a universal expression of fear isn’t universal at all. But if Trobrianders have a different interpretation of facial expressions, what does that mean? One emerging – and increasingly supported – theory is that facial expressions don’t reflect our feelings.
-
From ‘Dr. Evil’ to hero maker: Philip Zimbardo
After decades of notoriety for demonstrating one of social psychology’s fundamental tenets — how morally pliable most people are — Philip Zimbardo is understandably tired of being associated with the darker sides of human behavior. “I really don’t want to be permanently labeled ‘Dr. Evil,’” Zimbardo said. Yet the 85-year-old San Francisco psychologist, who taught at Stanford for 50 years and remains a go-to authority on topics such as shyness and the paradox of time as well as social coercion, knows that history has a way of flattening careers into one landmark accomplishment. For Zimbardo, that would be the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.
