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Aging Photographs and Cognitive Quilts
The Huffington Post: I am a Baby Boomer and a child of the '60s, and for both those reasons I am keenly aware of my memory, and its failings. I'm not alone in this. For a growing number of adults, questions about cognitive aging are increasingly personal and relevant. We want to know what, specifically, will keep us sharp into old age. Will reading Tolstoy do it? Or playing racquetball? ... The scientists took a variety of cognitive measures before and after the classes began.
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Expansive Postures May Lead Us to Dishonesty
Scientific American: Expansive body postures, like stretching one’s legs, confer a sense of power. And studies show that the feeling of power can lead to dishonest behavior. Now researchers find that just sitting at a big desk or in a large chair can also influence one’s honesty. ... In a real-world setting the researchers also found that those who drove cars with expansive seats parked illegally more often that those with smaller driver’s seats. The studies are in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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How to Escape from Bad Decisions
LinkedIn: When we make a choice that doesn’t work out, we find it remarkably difficult to cut our losses and walk away. Think about the last time you waited for 45 minutes at a restaurant, and there was no sign that your table would be ready in the near future. You should have probably headed to another restaurant, but you’d already waited 45 minutes, so how could you leave? Or you hired an employee who struggled to master the key skills for the job, and after several months of training and coaching, things hadn’t improved. You rotated him to two different positions that seem like a better fit, and he underperformed there too.
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Daniel M. Wegner, 65; Harvard social psychologist unraveled mysteries of thought and memory
The Boston Globe: If you read much of Dan Wegner’s writings on psychology, pretty soon you cannot stop thinking about Dan Wegner, particularly if you try to forget him. He could have told you that would happen. After all, he wrote a book about the difficulty of suppressing thoughts, and his research showed that the more we try to not think about something, the more likely we are to talk about what we are trying not to think about. Those studies are detailed in “White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts,” his 1989 book on suppression and obsession that would have been a capstone of some careers. For Dr. Wegner, it was simply the tip of the ice floe.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science and Psychological Science. Blair E. Wisco, Denise M. Sloan, and Brian P. Marx Do cognitive emotion-regulation strategies influence the effectiveness of interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Participants with PTSD were assigned to receive a 5-week written exposure therapy (WET) or to a waitlist condition. Before and after the intervention, both groups of participants were assessed for Axis 1 disorders, severity of PTSD symptoms, and use of cognitive emotion-regulation strategies (self-blame, rumination, positive reappraisal, and putting into perspective).
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Can science explain why I’m a pessimist?
BBC: Debbie and Trudi are identical twins. They have much in common, except that Trudi is cheerful and optimistic while Debbie is prone to bouts of profound depression. It is likely that her depression was triggered by a major life event, though the twins have different views as to what that event might have been. By studying a group of identical twins like Debbie and Trudi, Prof Tim Spector, based at St Thomas' hospital in London, has been trying to answer fundamental questions about how our personality is formed. Why are some people more positive about life than others? Read the whole story: BBC
