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Are You a Career Adapter?
Over the course of your career, you’ll change jobs, get promoted, take on new responsibilities, encounter new technologies, and adjust to new supervisors, co-workers and subordinates. You might assume that your ability to navigate through those changes rests in large part on your personality traits. But new behavioral research paints a more nuanced view of what scientists call career adaptability—the ability to manage existing and impending career challenges. An international team of vocational psychologists recently developed a new measure, the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS), to assess how individuals manage their career development.
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Boosting Self-Worth Can Counteract Cognitive Effects of Poverty
For people in poverty, remembering better times — such as past success — improves cognitive functioning by several IQ points and increases their willingness to seek help from crucial aid services, a study finds.
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Income Inequality Is Rising, But Maybe Not as Fast as You Think
Americans’ perceptions of income inequality are largely over-inflated when compared with actual census data, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “With the genuine rise in wealth inequality over the past several decades, and the popular media’s intensive coverage of this issue, we wondered how income inequality is perceived by the average American,” says psychological scientist John Chambers of St. Louis University.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Behavioral Sensitivity to Reward Is Reduced for Far Objects David A. O'Connor, Bernard Meade, Olivia Carter, Sarah Rossiter, and Robert Hester Does spatial distance affect the ways people respond to rewarding objects? Participants received a reward for correctly identifying red, green, or blue squares and spheres presented in near or far space using a 3-D screen. They received a reward for correct responses, and the magnitude of the reward was linked to the color of the object.
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A List of Reasons Why Our Brains Love Lists
The New Yorker: “6 TITANIC SURVIVORS WHO SHOULD HAVE DIED.” “THESE 9 NAZI ATROCITIES WILL MAKE YOU LOSE FAITH IN HUMANITY.” “5 INSANE PLANS FOR FEEDING WEST BERLIN YOU WON’T BELIEVE ARE REAL.” These are just some of the lists that the comic strip “XKCD” recently joked would result from retrofitting the twentieth century’s most newsworthy events with modern, Internet-style headlines. Despite the growing derision of listicles exemplified by the comic, numbered lists—a venerable media format—have become one of the most ubiquitous ways to package content on the Web. Why do we find them so appealing?
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Oxytocin Found to Stimulate Social Brain Regions in Children With Autism
The New York Times: The hormone oxytocin has been generating excitement — and caution — among people who care about autism. Scientists have been eager to see if oxytocin, which plays a role in emotional bonding, trust and many biological processes, can improve social behavior in people with autism. Some parents of children with autism have asked doctors to prescribe it, although it is not an approved treatment for autism, or have purchased lower-dose versions of the drug over the counter. Scientifically, the jury is out, and experts say parents should wait until more is known.
