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His and Hers: Study Examines the Role of Gender in the Stigma of Mental-Illness
The mentally ill don’t get a fair shake in this country. Many employers don’t want to hire them, and health insurers don’t want to treat their illnesses. Even within their own communities and families, the mentally ill are often treated with contempt and outright anger. There have been many efforts to combat the stigma of mental illness, but with limited success at best. That’s in part because the stereotypes are so powerful: Mental patients are either violently dangerous or docile and incompetent. We fear the first and disdain the latter. These are not equal opportunity stereotypes, however.
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Picky Preschoolers: Young Children Prefer Majority Opinion
When we are faced with a decision, and we’re not sure what to do, usually we’ll just go with the majority opinion. When do we begin adopting this strategy of “following the crowd”? In a new report in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists Kathleen H. Corriveau, Maria Fusaro, and Paul L. Harris of Harvard University describe experiments suggesting that this tendency starts very early on, around preschool age. In this study, three- and four-year-old children watched as a small group of people (either three or four members) named a novel object.
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I Totally Empathize With You…Sometimes: Effects of Empathy on Ethnic Group Interactions
Increased empathy toward minority group members is one way to reduce prejudice and promote more positive inter-group relationships. When individuals take on the perspective of someone from a different group, a number of processes and feelings are set in motion that should lead to more positive feelings toward members of that group. But University of Manitoba psychologists Jacquie D. Vorauer and Stacey J. Sasaki wanted to investigate the effect of empathy in actual interactions with minority group members.
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Yours, Mine, Ours: When You and I Share Perspectives
While reading a novel, as the author describes the main character washing dishes or cooking dinner, we will often create a mental image of someone in the kitchen performing these tasks. Sometimes we may even imagine ourselves as the dishwasher or top chef in these scenarios. Why do we imagine these scenes differently- when do we view the action from an outsider’s perspective and when do we place ourselves in the main character’s shoes? Psychologist Tad T. Brunyé from the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) and Tufts University, along with Tali Ditman, Caroline R. Mahoney and Holly A. Taylor from Tufts University and Jason S.
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Study Suggests Collective Religious Rituals, Not Religious Devotion, Spur Support for Suicide Attacks
In a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Ian Hansen from the New School for Social Research along with psychologist Ara Norenzayan from the University of British Columbia conducted a series of experiments investigating the relationship between religion and support for acts of parochial altruism, including suicide attacks. Suicide attacks are an extreme form of “parochial altruism”—they combine a parochial act (the attacker killing members from other groups) with altruism (the attacker sacrificing themselves for the group).
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Is Difficult Better? Study Reveals We Tend to Ignore Simple Items While Pursuing Goals
Try the following experiment with two young children. To one child, hold a toy out just beyond their grasp and watch them bounce all over the place trying to reach it. With the second child, just hand the toy over to them. Is the first child likely to find the toy more interesting than the other child? When we are pursuing a goal, we need to carefully consider the best ways of achieving it. If we come across something very difficult, how will that affect our ability to meet our goal? University of Chicago psychologists Aparna A. Labroo and Sara Kim investigated the extent that subjective feelings of difficulty are associated with an increased appeal towards a product.
