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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science. Attentional Capture Does Not Depend on Feature Similarity, but on Target-Nontarget Relations Stefanie I. Becker, Charles L. Folk, and Roger W. Remington What determines which part of a scene will be visually selected? Most top-down accounts suggest that once a target feature (e.g., color) is selected, items most similar to this feature should attract attention. However, according to a new relational account, the visual system can evaluate the relationship between the target feature and the feature of irrelevant nontarget items and direct attention toward items with the same relationship.
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Age Brings Happiness
Scientific American Mind Do people get happier or crankier as they age? Stereotypes of crotchety neighbors aside, scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been conflicting. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being indeed increases with age—but overall happiness depends on when a person was born. Previous studies that have compared older adults with the middle-aged and young have sometimes found that older adults are not as happy. But these studies could not discern whether their discontent was because of their age or because of their different life experience.
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Tylenol Fights Headaches…and Existential Angst?
Smithsonian Magazine: Everyone knows you can pop a Tylenol to ease a headache or reduce a fever. But that’s not all. A new study suggests that you can also take Tylenol to ease the psychological angst of watching weird, twisted David Lynch films, or to generally ward off existential dread of death and nothingness. In what is perhaps one of the oddest studies in recent memory, researchers in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia hypothesized that overwhelming feelings of pointlessness and physical pain may be located in the same part of the brain, LiveScience explains.
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Playing for All Kinds of Possibilities
The New York Times: When it comes to play, humans don’t play around. And in doing so, they develop some of humanity’s most consequential faculties. They learn the art, pleasure and power of hypothesis — of imagining new possibilities. And serious students of play believe that this helps make the species great. The idea that play contributes to human success goes back at least a century. But in the last 25 years or so, researchers like Elizabeth S. Spelke, Brian Sutton-Smith, Jaak Panksepp and Alison Gopnik have developed this notion more richly and tied it more closely to both neuroscience and human evolution.
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The best lie detectors in the workplace
The Washington Post: Do you have an employee who doesn’t follow through on her promises? What about a coworker who exaggerates his accomplishments or tinkers with the numbers? Chances are these folks duped someone during the hiring process into overestimating their potential. In organizations, nowhere is judging character more important than in evaluating talent. When screening prospective executives and employees, company leaders constantly make predictions about whether these candidates will act in good faith and measure up to the requirements of their roles, or if they have oversold their talents and will have a negative impact on colleagues and the bottom line.
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You can catch depression – study
The New Zealand Herald: Depression and the emotions associated with it can be contagious, according to a new study. Researchers have found that the gloomy mindset of students vulnerable to depression can be catching, making their friends more likely to suffer the condition six months later. The research follows studies showing that people who respond negatively to stressful life events - interpreting them as the result of factors they can't change and as a reflection of their own shortcomings - are more vulnerable to depression. This "cognitive vulnerability" is such a strong risk factor for depression that it can be used to predict who is likely to experience depression in the future.
