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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about new research published in Psychological Science. Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness Pronobesh Banerjee, Promothesh Chatterjee, and Jayati Sinha Can the recollection of past ethical and unethical acts change a person's perception of brightness? Participants were asked to recall an ethical or an unethical event from their past.They were then asked to rate their preference for a number of items -- a lamp, a cracker, and a candle, for example -- and were asked to judge the brightness of the testing room.
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Imagining the Future Invokes Your Memory
Scientific American: I remember my retirement like it was yesterday. As I recall, I am still working, though not as hard as I did when I was younger. My wife and I still live in the city, where we bicycle a fair amount and stay fit. We have a favorite coffee shop where we read the morning papers and say hello to the other regulars. We don’t play golf. In reality, I’m not even close to retirement. This is just a scenario I must have spun out at some point in the past. There are other future scenarios, but the details aren’t all that important. Notably, all of my futures have a peaceful and contented feel to them.
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Advice urges wider sharing of heart care decisions
USA Today: A heart device might save your life but leave you miserable. That awful possibility is the reason for new advice urging doctors to talk more honestly with people who have very weak hearts and are considering pumps, pacemakers, new valves or procedures to open clogged arteries. Too often, patients with advanced heart failure don't realize what they are getting into when they agree to a treatment, and doctors assume they want everything possible done to keep them alive, says the new advice, published Monday by the American Heart Association and endorsed by other medical groups.
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Facebook and Smartphones: New Tools for Psychological Science Research—News Brief
WASHINGTON -- Whether you’re an iPerson who can’t live without a Mac, a Facebook addict, or a gamer, you know that social media and technology say things about your personality and thought processes. And psychological scientists know it too – they’ve started researching how new media and devices both reveal and change our mental states. Two recent articles in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, explored how trends in technology are changing the questions psychological scientists are asking and the ways they ask them.
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Parents Are Happier People
Contrary to recent scholarship and popular belief, parents experience greater levels of happiness and meaning in life than people without children, according to researchers from the University of California, Riverside, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University. Parents also are happier during the day when they are caring for their children than during their other daily activities, the researchers found in a series of studies conducted in the United States and Canada. These findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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A Divine Way to Resist Temptation
The Wall Street Journal: I was raised in a kosher household. Though I never fully understood why I couldn't eat cheeseburgers or pepperoni pizza—the theology still confuses me—I quickly learned to follow the rules. At birthday parties, I always informed the hosts that I preferred my pizza plain. If they forgot, I would just eat the crust. What's odd about such self-restraint is that I was terrible at holding back my childish desires in almost every other way. Even as I skipped the pepperoni, I would often gorge myself on cake. I could deny myself lobster, but I would throw massive tantrums if I didn't get my box of Milk Duds at the movies.
