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Fighting Crime, One License Plate at a Time?
You’re driving down the street when you witness a hit-and-run incident between two other cars. The offending driver speeds off before you have a chance to jot down their license plate number. You’ve only had a few seconds to memorize the plate but you know that the more you can remember, the more likely police are to nab the hit-and-run driver. This is no small feat. Vanity plates aside, the seeming arbitrariness of the letters and numbers that grace most license plates makes them tricky to memorize on the spot.
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How We Store Food At Home Could Be Linked To How Much We Eat
NPR: Keeping food out of sight could be a way to keep it out of your mouth. That's the hunch of Charles Emery, a psychologist at Ohio State University, anyway. His latest research suggests that how food is set up around the house could be influencing how much people eat and, ultimately, how heavy they might be. There are a lot of factors that scientists say explain obesity — defined as a body-mass index over 30 — from genetics to lifestyle changes to socio-economic status. But Emery says the home environment and how it may influence eating behaviors has largely been left unexamined. So his team decided to "look at every aspect of the home environment related to food," he says.
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Marriage at a 100-year low — and that’s a good thing
Chicago Tribune: Brace yourselves for the latest evidence that Americans are fleeing the institution of marriage like Roger Sterling leaves wives. A report release Monday from Demographic Intelligence, which tracks marriage and birth trends in the United States, said marriage rates are the lowest in a century — 6.74 marriages per 1,000 people — and are projected to decline over the next decade. "Even though we have seen a modest recovery in the economy, the marriage rate continues to slowly decline," Demographic Intelligence president Sam Sturgeon says in the report.
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Five words you should stop using when you talk about food
The New Zealand Herald: Words matter, perhaps more than you realise. How you describe something expresses your underlying attitude about it, but the words themselves reflect back at you, shaping your thoughts and actions and impacting your success. A lot of research has been done with athletes - they achieve better results when they talk to themselves with positive, motivational language. But this wordplay goes beyond sports to everyday performance. One study published in Psychological Science revealed the effect a small turn of phrase can have.
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Psychological Scientists Address the Challenges of an Aging Workforce
Older adults are a growing proportion of the American workforce in unprecedented numbers. For the first time since 1948, American employees over age 65 outnumber teenage workers, according to a report from AARP. Yet, older workers are still beset by discriminatory hiring and negative stereotypes about their capabilities and competence. Last week, psychological scientists from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) hosted a congressional briefing in the Senate demonstrating how evidence-based strategies can help organizations and policymakers successfully manage the emerging challenges of the world’s aging workforce.
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Speaking a Mile in Someone Else’s Shoes
Pacific Standard: In the midst of a debate over the potential cognitive benefits of learning a second language, new research suggests it may have social value as well. Actually, even being around people who speak different languages may help children learn to take others' perspectives, making communication more effective for everyone. "[E]xposure to multiple languages is, and has been for millennia, an integral part of human development," writes a team led by University of Chicago psychology graduate student Samantha Fan in Psychological Science.
