-
When a Gun Is Not a Gun
The New York Times: THE Justice Department recently analyzed eight years of shootings by Philadelphia police officers. Its report contained two sobering statistics: Fifteen percent of those shot were unarmed; and in half of these cases, an officer reportedly misidentified a “nonthreatening object (e.g., a cellphone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband)” as a weapon. Many factors presumably contribute to such shootings, ranging from carelessness to unconscious bias to explicit racism, all of which have received considerable attention of late, and deservedly so. But there is a lesser-known psychological phenomenon that might also explain some of these shootings.
-
The Joy of Scents
Slate: Being able to transmit positive emotions may also have a profound social impact, says Gün Semin, a psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and lead researcher on the study. After all, “the pursuit of happiness is not an individual enterprise,” as he and his fellow researchers write rather eloquently in the new study. So Semin’s team decided to test whether people could communicate happiness via sweat. Read the whole story: Slate
-
Think of the Future in Days, Not Years, to Meet Your Goals
Big Think: When given the choice, we often choose our present needs over the needs of our future selves. In fact, a recent study indicates that we see our future selves as a stranger — we don't care what happens to them down the line. Even though we probably should. Lead researcher Daphna Oyserman of the University of Southern California thinks there's a solution — a way to hack our brains to create a connection to the future and push our present selves to action. All you have to do is frame time in days instead of years. Read the whole story: Big Think
-
Helmet or No Helmet? It Depends Which Side of the Atlantic You’re On
The Wall Street Journal: I learned to ride my bicycle at the edge of a small German village. My parents fastened a set of training wheels to it, strapped a helmet onto my head, and gave me a gentle push down the road. With practice, the training wheels came off, and the helmet disappeared at some point during high school. It seemed like a natural progression in which “going helmet-free” was merely one of the rites that mark the gradual transition toward adolescence: the first drink, the first kiss, the first unprotected bike ride—although not necessarily in that order.
-
New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Self-Distancing From Trauma Memories Reduces Physiological but Not Subjective Emotional Reactivity Among Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Blair E. Wisco, Brian P. Marx, Denise M. Sloan, Kaitlyn R. Gorman, Andrea L. Kulish, and Suzanne L. Pineles Self-distancing (i.e., taking a third-person perspective) has been shown to reduce emotional and physiological reactivity during self-reflection. In this study, veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were instructed to recount and analyze their worst traumatic event from either a first-person or a third-person perspective.
-
Distraction Is Good for Learning, Sometimes
Scientific American: Distraction can be a good thing for learning under the right circumstances—namely when you will be tested or have to perform under similarly distracting contexts. Those distracted during just one phase performed poorly when tested, but those who had done the letter-counting task during both training and testing performed just as well as those who had trained and been tested without distractions, according to the results published in February in Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Scientific American
