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God thoughts influence your generosity
Thoughts related to God cultivate cooperative behavior and generosity, according to University of British Columbia psychology researchers. In a study to be published in the September issue of Psychological Science journal, researchers investigated how thinking about God and notions of a higher power influenced positive social behavior, specifically cooperation with others and generosity to strangers. UBC PhD graduate Azim Shariff and UBC Assoc. Prof. Ara Norenzayan found that priming people with ‘god concepts’ – by activating subconscious thoughts through word games – promoted altruism.
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The More Common the Digit, the More Luminous the Color in Grapheme Color Synaesthesia
A psychological phenomenon known as “grapheme-color synaesthesia” describes individuals who experience vivid colors whenever they see, hear, or think of ordinary letters and digits. A hallmark of synaesthesia is that individuals tend to be idiosyncratic in their experiences, though these experiences are consistent for synaesthetes throughout their lifetime. But new research appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that a particular commonality exists across synaesthetes, who otherwise have very distinctive experiences.
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UCR Psychology Professor Wins Award
The Association for Psychological Science honors Howard Friedman for a lifetime of research that has shaped health psychology. Howard Friedman, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, has won the prestigious James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. The award, which will be presented at the annual convention in Chicago in May 2008, recognizes association members for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to the area of applied psychological research. Recipients’ research must address a critical problem in society at large.
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Association for Psychological Science: Celebrating 20 years as the leading voice in psychological science
2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the Association for Psychological Science. Since its formation in 1988, APS has committed its resources to promoting scientific theory, practice and research. It has attracted a membership consisting of the top researchers and most promising students in the field of psychological science. One of the chief reasons for the establishment of APS was to provide a strong independent voice for psychological science in Washington.
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Back to School: Cramming Doesn’t Work in the Long Run
When you look back on your school days, doesn’t it seem like you studied all the time? However, most of us seem to have retained almost nothing from our early immersion in math, history, and foreign language. Were we studying the wrong way during all those wee hours? Well, as it turns out we may have been. Psychologists have been assessing how well various study strategies produce long-term learning, and it appears that some strategies really do work much better than others. Consider “overlearning.” That’s the term learning specialists use for studying material immediately after you’ve mastered it.
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New Study Suggests we Remember the Bad Times Better than the Good
Do you remember exactly where you were when you learned of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? Your answer is probably yes, and researchers are beginning to understand why we remember events that carry negative emotional weight. In the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Boston College psychologist, Elizabeth Kensinger and colleagues, explain when emotion is likely to reduce our memory inconsistencies.
