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Daniel M. Wegner, 65; Harvard social psychologist unraveled mysteries of thought and memory
The Boston Globe: If you read much of Dan Wegner’s writings on psychology, pretty soon you cannot stop thinking about Dan Wegner, particularly if you try to forget him. He could have told you that would happen. After all, he wrote a book about the difficulty of suppressing thoughts, and his research showed that the more we try to not think about something, the more likely we are to talk about what we are trying not to think about. Those studies are detailed in “White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts,” his 1989 book on suppression and obsession that would have been a capstone of some careers. For Dr. Wegner, it was simply the tip of the ice floe.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science and Psychological Science. Blair E. Wisco, Denise M. Sloan, and Brian P. Marx Do cognitive emotion-regulation strategies influence the effectiveness of interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Participants with PTSD were assigned to receive a 5-week written exposure therapy (WET) or to a waitlist condition. Before and after the intervention, both groups of participants were assessed for Axis 1 disorders, severity of PTSD symptoms, and use of cognitive emotion-regulation strategies (self-blame, rumination, positive reappraisal, and putting into perspective).
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Can science explain why I’m a pessimist?
BBC: Debbie and Trudi are identical twins. They have much in common, except that Trudi is cheerful and optimistic while Debbie is prone to bouts of profound depression. It is likely that her depression was triggered by a major life event, though the twins have different views as to what that event might have been. By studying a group of identical twins like Debbie and Trudi, Prof Tim Spector, based at St Thomas' hospital in London, has been trying to answer fundamental questions about how our personality is formed. Why are some people more positive about life than others? Read the whole story: BBC
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Buying Behavior Can Be Swayed by Cultural Mindset
There are some combinations that just go well together: Milk and cookies, eggs and bacon, pancakes and maple syrup. But new research reveals that people with individualistic mindsets differ from their collectivist counterparts in ascribing value to those perfect combinations. The collection of new studies, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, demonstrate that people with collectivist mindsets tend to value the relationships between items more than the particular items themselves.
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Low self-control makes you selfless
The Times of India: When people face the choice of sacrificing time and energy for a person that they love or taking a self-centered route, their first impulse is to think of others, a new research has suggested. Lead researcher Francesca Righetti of VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said that for decades psychologists have assumed that the first impulse is selfish and that it takes self-control to behave in a pro-social manner, which she said they did not believe that this was true in every context, and especially not in close relationships.
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The Unintended Consequences of Company Wellness Penalties
The Daily Beast: More and more companies are saying yes—and not only can your company encourage you to get healthy, it can punish you for being overweight, usually by raising your health-care premiums. That’s right—being unhealthy could start digging into your paycheck. About 18 percent of workplace wellness programs include some kind of penalty for employees who don’t get healthy—and a 2010 survey by Hewitt Associates found that percentage is expected to rise to 47 percent by 2015. But three new studies on workplace wellness incentives have found that employees aren’t taking new penalty-laden policies lightly.
