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Having a Male Co-Twin Improves Mental Rotation Performance in Females
Having a sibling, especially a twin, impacts your life. Your twin may be your best friend or your biggest rival, but throughout life you influence each other. However, a recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that having an opposite-sex twin may impact you even before you are born: females with a male co-twin score higher on mental rotation task than females with a female co-twin. Males, as young as three months of age, outperform females on mental rotation tasks, tests that require rotation of three dimensional objects in mental space.
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Clean hands, but a foul mouth!
Lady Macbeth is history's most famous washer, hands down. Plagued by guilt for plotting her king's murder, she scrubs and scours her palms and knuckles to get rid of imagined blood stains. But all the scrubbing can't cleanse her impure heart. Or mind, as psychological scientists like to think of it. Researchers have discovered in the past few years that moral purity is no mere metaphor--that we all physically embody both our malevolent thoughts and our repentance. Soap and water can literally salve our guilt, and soften our moral judgments of others, while moral transgressions can send us searching for wash cloths and disinfectants.
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Verbal Snippets Offer Insights on Well-Being Amid Separation, Divorce
A new study from the University of Arizona shows that people in the midst of a divorce typically reveal how they are handling things – not so much by what they say but how they say it. In fact, data revealed that even complete strangers were able to figure out how people were coping with their emotions using relatively small amounts of information. The study, published online in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a number of relatively recent person-perception studies that examine interpersonal distress, in this case when a marriage ends.
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How schooling leads to good health
People who go to school lead healthier, longer lives. That connection is well documented and unsurprising. But as obvious as this link is to us, the fact is we don't really know why that's the case. What is it about formal education that translates -- sometimes way down the road -- into better health choices? What's going on in the mind, at the basic cognitive level, that gives rise to lasting life skills? One possibility is that schooling simply conveys knowledge about illness and disease prevention, and that better informed people make sounder judgments. But there is good reason to doubt this explanation.
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Text Messages Reveal the Emotional Timeline of September 11, 2001
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have been called the defining moment of our time. Thousands of people died and the attacks had huge individual and collective consequences, including two wars. But less is known about the immediate emotional reactions to the attacks. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed text messages sent on September 11, 2001 for emotional words. They found spiking anxiety and steadily increasing anger through that fateful day. The researchers took advantage of transcripts of more than 500,000 text messages sent to pagers on the day of the attacks.
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Anger trumped terror on 9/11
If a terrorist attack provokes mostly anger instead of fear, does that mean it has failed? It's an intriguing question in light of a new study, which tracked Americans' negative emotions throughout the day of September 11, 2001. The timeline begins at 6:45 a.m., two hours before the attacks on the World Trade Center, and continues until 12:44 a.m. the following day--covering 20 hours in all. It shows that emotions like hate and wrath were present immediately after the first attack--and increased steadily and strongly the more people learned about the nature of the attacks.
