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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring interpretation bias in anxiety and depression, neural reward responsiveness in children with suicidal ideation, and eye movements and false-memory rates.
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How to have great meetings, according to 200 scientific studies
Americans average six hours per week in meetings. And managers especially spend considerably more time in them. But attendees rate as many as half of the meetings they attend as “poor,” and organizations in the US waste an estimated $213 billion on ineffective meetings annually. What are the keys to effective meetings? Researchers at the University of Nebraska and Clemson University reviewed almost 200 scientific studies of meetings published in the last decade. Their conclusions, published last year in a Current Directions in Psychological Science journal article, offer a roadmap for getting meetings right.
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We’re All Gonna Die! How Fear Of Death Drives Our Behavior
Many people tend to push frightening realities out of mind rather than face them head-on. That's especially true when it comes to the terrifying event that no one can escape — death. Psychologist Sheldon Solomon says people may suppress conscious thoughts about their mortality, but unconscious ones still seep through. In the book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, Solomon, along with psychologists Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, illustrate how death anxiety influences people's behavior in ways they would never suspect.
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The Awkward but Essential Art of Office Chitchat
Every day around the world, an estimated three billion people go to work and 2.9 billion of them avoid making small talk with their co-workers once they get there. Their avoidance strategies vary. Some will keep their headphones in and their eyes low.
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Optimists For The Win: Finding The Bright Side Might Help You Live Longer
Good news for the cheery: A Boston study published this month suggests people who tend to be optimistic are likelier than others to live to be 85 years old or more. That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length — such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say. Their work appears in a recent issue of the science journal PNAS.
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Understanding Cultural Differences Around Social Norms
Q: Societies have norms which you’ve described as tight or loose—what does it mean for norms to be tight or loose, and how is that put into practice? Today more than ever, we need to understand cultural differences. A lot of times, we think about our differences in terms of rather superficial characteristics like red versus blue, East versus West, rich versus poor, religious versus secular. I’m a cross-cultural psychologist and have been trying to understand the deeper codes that drive behavior. My focus has been on the degree to which groups strictly adhere to social norms. All groups have norms, or unwritten rules for behavior.
