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Do you want the good news or the bad news first?
ScienceNews: “So, there’s good news and bad news.” An opening like that will send a chill through your veins, no matter what the topic. It’s especially worrying when coming from a significant other or a doctor. And the statement is often followed by a question: Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news? A new study says that you probably want the bad news first. But it also finds that, if the decision is left to the news deliverer, you can’t always get what you want.
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Work Disputes Less Troubling When They Involve the Job Itself
We all have colleagues that we simply don’t like. Those personal frictions color our attitudes throughout the day and even after work. But if a run-in with a co-worker involves a specific work-related dispute, the tensions tend to abate rather quickly, a new study shows. A research team led by Laurenz Meier, an industrial/organizational psychologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, examined how people’s reported feelings of anger varied from day to day. Meier and her colleagues asked 131 participants to keep diaries about their moods before and after work over a two-week period.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: A Dissociation of Performance and Awareness During Binocular Rivalry Daniel H. Baker and John R. Cass In binocular rivalry, a different image is shown to each eye and awareness of the images alternates between eyes over time. Interestingly, researchers find that people still show some sensitivity to images presented to the suppressed eye. To determine how this might happen, the researchers measured participants' sensitivity to probes presented to a single eye during periods of suppression or dominance.
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Your brain sees things that you don’t
PBS: Your brain saw something in the black and white image above, even if you didn't. According to a study published this week in the online journal Psychological Science, the brain processes and understands visual input, even if we are unaware of it. Jay Sanguinetti, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona, showed study participants black and white silhouettes. Some were just shapes, but a few images were outlines of real objects, like the seahorses in the image above. He monitored their brains with an electroencephalogram -- which looks like a swimming cap with wires. They were shown the pictures for 170 milliseconds, which is less than a quarter of a second.
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Scholarly reflections on the ‘selfie’
Oxford University Press Blog: When Oxford Dictionaries chose ‘selfie’ as their Word of the Year 2013, we invited several scholars from different fields to share their thoughts on this emerging phenomenon. “Theory of mind may be foremost among the factors that set people apart from other species. Yet, to know that others have a mind (full of beliefs, expectations, emotions, perceptions — some the same and some different from one’s own) is not enough to be really successful as the social animal.
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Too Aware? The Downside of Mindfulness Revealed
LiveScience: "Mindfulness" is the watchword of gurus and lifestyle coaches everywhere. But too much awareness could prevent the formation of good habits, new research suggests. People high in mindfulness — a state of active attention to what's going on in the present moment — are worse at automatic learning, according to the study, which is being presented today (Nov. 12) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. Automatic processes lead to the formation of habits — both good and bad, said study researcher Chelsea Stillman, a doctoral student in psychology at the Georgetown University Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. ...
