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The Flexibility of Racial Bias
Scientific American: The city of Baltimore was rocked by protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody. Tragically, Gray’s death was only one of a recent in a series of racially-charged, often violent, incidents. On April 4th, Walter Scott was fatally shot by a police officer after fleeing from a routine traffic stop. ... It would be easy to see in all this powerful evidence that racism is a permanent fixture in America’s social fabric and even, perhaps, an inevitable aspect of human nature. Indeed, the mere act of labeling others according to their age, gender, or race is a reflexive habit of the human mind.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: It's All in the Family: Brain Asymmetry and Syntactic Processing of Word Class Chia-lin Lee and Kara D. Federmeier The specialization of the left hemisphere for language processing is considered to be one of the key examples of functional lateralization in the brain; however, studies now indicate that the right hemisphere may play a larger role in language than was once assumed. Electroencephalographic data were collected as right-handed participants judged the grammaticality of phrases presented in the left or right visual field.
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To Treat Depression, a New Approach Tries Training the Brain
The Wall Street Journal: Should depression be treated more like a stroke? That’s the view of a growing number of researchers developing new psychological treatments that aim to directly target the particular brain dysfunctions and cognitive and emotional processes understood to underlie depression. The approach is to think of a brain region that goes awry as “more like a muscle that is atrophied,” says Greg J. Siegle, director of the Program in Cognitive Affective Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The solution to an atrophied muscle is to rehab it.” ... About two-thirds of depressed people have this negative attention bias, says Christopher G.
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Why People Buckle Up in Cars, But Not in Cabs
In May, Nobel Prize-winning economist John F. Nash Jr. and his wife Alicia were tragically killed in a car accident on the New Jersey expressway. Investigators reported that they were not wearing seat belts at the time, and died after being thrown from the backseat of their taxi. Whether you’re in the front or back of a car, wearing a seat belt is often the most effective way to prevent serious injury in case of an accident. Yet, in some situations -- such as riding in the back of a cab -- people are far less likely to buckle up. In New York City, taxi drivers and their passengers are exempt from laws regarding car seats and seat belts.
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This Is Why You Feel Dirty After A Bad Day At The Office
The Huffington Post: In the 1999 cult comedy “Office Space,” dissatisfied office drone Peter Gibbons spends his days bored out of his mind, working for a boss he loathes doing work he doesn’t care about. To make matters worse, he then goes home to a loveless relationship with a girlfriend who cheats on him. Through it all, he bites his tongue, never expressing his true feelings about that useless TPS report coversheet or the unfairness of the weekend work schedule.
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Can science make you less sexist while you sleep?
The Washington Post: No matter how open-minded you think you are, you're chock-full of what scientists call implicit biases -- prejudices you don't even realize that you have that color your actions. But a fascinating new study suggests that these biases can be cut down in your sleep. By having subjects go through a bias-diminishing exercise just before taking a nap -- during which the things they'd just learned were cued up by special sounds -- researchers were able to lower their biases up to a week after the fact. The results were published Thursday in Science.
