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Tip-of-the-tongue moments not tied to memory decline
Fox News: Did you ever want to say something, but the word or name gets "stuck on the tip of your tongue?" Don't worry. Those lapses may not be a sign of dementia - just age, suggests a new study. Researchers found those tip-of-the-tongue experiences become more common as people age, but are not related to worsening memory overall. "Our major finding is that they seem to be independent," Timothy Salthouse, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health. Salthouse is the Brown-Forman Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Studies had found that tip-of-the-tongue experiences are more common among older people.
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Why I Gossip at Work (And You Should Too)
LinkedIn: Ask people to generate a list of social sins, and sooner or later, gossip is bound to come up. Sure, it pales in comparison to coveting thy neighbor, but the Bible does warn us that we should “not go about spreading slander.” And if your mother is like mine, she probably told you that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say it at all. But what if our moms were wrong? In a series of new studies, social scientists have introduced a form of gossip that actually makes people better off. Imagine that you’re given $10. You can pass as much of the money as you want to Joe. The amount that you give him will be tripled, and he can then share as much as he wants with you.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Shaping Attention With Reward: Effects of Reward on Space- and Object-Based Selection Sarah Shomstein and Jacoba Johnson The effect of rewards on conscious choice has been extensively researched, but the effect of reward on automatic processes is still not well understood. To investigate the effect of reward on automatic processes, the researchers investigated whether rewards would affect performance on a space- and object-based selective-attention task. The presence of a reward (money or points) altered participants' responses during the task.
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Secret to helping brain age well? Painting and other mental challenges
The Boston Globe: I recently took a painting class with friends during which I learned that my lack of brush-stroke skills compounded my dearth of innate visual talents. Clearly, I’m the weakest link among my more artistic friends, which has made me hesitant to take more classes. But I’m rethinking my decision after hearing about a new study, which found that those who truly challenge themselves by learning novel skills get the biggest memory boost as they age. In other words, the instructors who painted such wonderful copies of a Van Gogh still-life likely weren’t working out their brains as hard as I was because painting—with all their practice and training—comes easy for them.
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Why Are Kids Who Get Less Candy Happier On Halloween?
NPR: What makes trick-or-treaters happy is candy. And more candy is better, right? Well, it turns out that might not actually be the case. A few years ago researchers did on Halloween night where some trick-or-treaters were given a candy bar, and others were given the candy bar and a piece of bubble gum. Now, in any rational universe, you would imagine that the kids who got the candy bar and the bubble gum would be happier than the kids who got just the candy bar. George Wolford, a psychologist at Dartmouth College, and his fellow researchers, Amy Doe and Alexander Rupert, found something quite different.
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Nalini Ambady, Psychologist of Intuition, Is Dead at 54
The New York Times: Nalini Ambady, a social psychologist whose research on the surprising accuracy of first impressions was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Blink,” his best-selling nonfiction book of 2005, died on Oct. 28 in Boston. She was 54. Her death, from leukemia, was announced by Stanford University, where she had taught since 2011. In “Blink,” subtitled “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” Mr. Gladwell explored the psychology of intuition, snap judgments and gut reactions. The book prominently features Professor Ambady’s work, which centered on the cognitive processes underpinning intuition.
