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News in Brief: Association for Psychological Science meeting
ScienceNews: Familiarity breeds congeniality Snap judgments about others sometimes depend not on what the person looks like but on whom they look like. Women tend to preferentially like male strangers who facially resemble the woman’s romantic partner, psychologist Gül Günaydin of Cornell University reported May 27. This type of social attraction often occurs unconsciously, Günaydin’s team found. For unclear reasons, men showed no signs of especially liking women who resembled a romantic partner. Members of 30 romantic couples observed opposite-sex strangers’ faces for half a second on a computer screen. Some faces were digitally altered to resemble the volunteers’ partners.
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El ejercicio mental que de verdad aumenta la inteligencia
ABC Espana: Ni autodefinidos, ni sudokus, ni música de Mozart ni lo último en complicados juegos electrónicos. La mejor manera de entrenar nuestro cerebro para aumentar realmente nuestra inteligencia es un pequeño ejercicio llamado «entrenamiento n-back», según concluye un estudio de la Universidad de Michigan. Básicamente, la tarea consiste en recordar las posiciones de una figura que se mueve de forma cíclica en una pantalla, y los investigadores aseguran que su práctica 20 minutos diarios durante 20 días mejora los resultados en una prueba de inteligencia. Al parecer, aumenta la capacidad de razonar y de resolver nuevos problemas, una mejoría que se prolonga al menos durante tres meses.
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Depression and Negative Thoughts
We all have our ups and downs—a fight with a friend, a divorce, the loss of a parent. But most of us get over it. Only some go on to develop major depression. Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests part of the reason may be that people with depression get stuck on bad thoughts because they’re unable to turn their attention away. People who don’t recover from negative events seem to keep going over their troubles. “They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again,” says Jutta Joormann, of the University of Miami.
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Your Name Impacts How Others Judge You
LiveScience: Alexandra will get an A in class but Amber won't. At least, that's what their peers expect, according to a small new study of the meanings encoded in people's names. "The name you give your kid is sort of a proxy for a whole bunch of things in our culture," study researcher John Waggoner of Bloomberg University of Pennsylvania told LiveScience. Names have been linked to many life choices, including what kind of work people do and how they donate to charity. Previous studies have shown that what people name their children varies by their socioeconomic status and education level. Waggoner and his colleagues wondered if people's names affect what others expect of them.
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Is It Hot Outside? You Might Be More Likely to Believe in Global Warming
TIME: A study recently published in Psychological Science suggests that daily weather dictates climate change opinion, indicating that "irrelevant environmental information, such as the current weather, can affect judgments." Researchers from the Columbia University Center for Decision Sciences asked residents in the United States and Australia to detail their climate change opinions and report whether the day's temperature was warmer or colder than usual. They found that "respondents who thought that day was warmer than usual believed more in and had greater concern about global warming than respondents who thought that day was colder than usual.
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Disbelieving Free Will Makes Brain Less Free
WIRED: If people are told that free will doesn’t exist, their brains might follow suit. A test of people who read passages discrediting the notion of free will found an immediate decrease in brain activity related to voluntary action. The findings are just one data point in ongoing scientific investigation of a millennia-old philosophical conundrum, but they raise an intriguing possibility. “Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,” wrote researchers led by psychologist Davide Rigoni of Italy’s University of Padova in a study published in May’s Psychological Science. Read the whole story: WIRED
