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Mass Killings May Have Created Contagion, Feeding on Itself
The New York Times: The horrifying rash of massacres during this violent summer suggests that public, widely covered rampage killings have led to a kind of contagion, prompting a small number of people with strong personal grievances and scant political ideology to mine previous attacks for both methods and potential targets to express their lethal anger and despair. The Iranian-German who killed nine people at a Munich mall was reportedly obsessed with mass killings, particularly the attack by a Norwegian that killed 77 people in 2011.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Reconsidering Temporal Selection in the Attentional Blink Patrick T. Goodbourn, Paolo Martini, Michael Barnett-Cowan, Irina M. Harris, Evan J. Livesey, and Alex O. Holcombe When two stimuli are presented in close succession, people often report the first but fail to report the second. In studies of this phenomenon, which is known as attentional blink, many items are presented in rapid succession and participants are asked to make judgments (presence or absence, report the identity) about two target stimuli (T1 and T2) appearing in the string of items. The time between the presentation of T1 and T2 is called a lag.
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What Experts Wish You Knew about False Memories
Scientific American: Every memory you have ever had is chock-full of errors. I would even go as far as saying that memory is largely an illusion. This is because our perception of the world is deeply imperfect, our brains only bother to remember a tiny piece of what we actually experience, and every time we remember something we have the potential to change the memory we are accessing. I often write about the ways in which our memory leads us astray, with a particular focus on ‘false memories.’ False memories are recollections that feel real but are not based on actual experience. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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How Hashtags, Texts, and Tweets Are Influencing Digital Language
Science Friday: Have texting and tweeting killed the period? Are hashtags and emoji becoming a new form of online punctuation? It seems digital communication, like all other types of language, has its own evolving rules. Psychologist Celia Klin tells us why a period in a text can convey a different emotion compared to a written messages. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch takes us through the different meanings of this, THIS, and #this, and how punctuation, syntax, and hashtags are being used to create a digital tone of voice. Read the whole story: Science Friday
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Scholars Talk Writing: Steven Pinker
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Steven Pinker is about as close as you can come to being an academic celebrity. The Harvard professor of psychology has written seven books for a general readership in addition to his scholarly work, which is wide-ranging. Pinker frequently writes about language for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The Atlantic, and also tackles subjects such as education, morality, politics, bioethics, and violence. ... Since many people are under the misconception that you have to write badly in academia to be taken seriously, I’ll just mention some renowned scholars in my own field whom I read as an undergraduate and who were sparkling prose stylists.
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Going the Distance: Babies Reach Farther With Adults Around
Eight-month-old infants are much more likely to reach towards distant toys when an adult is present than when they are by themselves, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that 8-month-olds understand when they need another person’s help to accomplish a task and act accordingly.
