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What’s in a Royal Name? Psychological Researchers Explain the Significance
The royal baby has been named — George Alexander Louis. And that handle will have a significant bearing on the child's future, psychological researchers say. As Jason Goldman of the University of Southern California describes in The Guardian, children born in European nations are more likely to have popular, traditional names than children born in countries colonized by European explorers. Those findings were reported in a 2011 study published in Psychological Science. And it appears the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed this naming norm, in effect safeguarding the child's future public image.
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Oxytocin May Reduce Anxiety Related to Social Threats, But Only for Some
Oxytocin — a hormone thought to promote trust and empathy — has been considered as a possible tool for the treatment of social anxiety. But research suggests that the effects of oxytocin promote prosocial behaviors only in people with low social anxiety.
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Distracted at Dinner? That’s Why Your Cooking Tastes Bland
Research suggests that in addition to making us eat more, distractions during meals may also make our food taste different.
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Hearing What We Read
Psychological scientists have discovered new evidence of what goes on in the brain when people read printed words. The scientists, led by Maria Dimitropoulou of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, in Donostia, Spain, used Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes, to investigate how knowledge about the relationship between written language and sound influences our ability to recognize words. The study was published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. In two experiments, the scientists used the masked priming paradigm, a method used to study visual word recognition.
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Grit Versus Aptitude: Relative Influence of Effort and Intelligence in Academic Success
In educational research, an age-old question has remained unanswered: Does IQ or hard work matter more in predicting success in school? Intellectual gifts have been studied extensively, but other non-cognitive factors contributing to success have been less carefully examined. One factor is “grit”, defined by Duckworth et al (2007), as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” This research studies the impact of grit, or perseverance for long-term goals and intelligence on middle school students’ GPAs. We hypothesized that change in grit over a span of two years would be a better predictor of GPA than aptitude (New York State Education Department Exams).
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Clean Hands = Clean Conscience for People with OCD
Cleaning one’s hands is associated with an alleviation of anxiety from moral misconduct. But this effect is even more pronounced in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), according to new research published in Clinical Psychological Science. Orna Reuven, Nira Liberman, and Reuven Dar of Tel Aviv University suspected that, because people with OCD are sometimes debilitated by obsessions about moral transgressions and cleanliness, the link between physical cleanliness and ethical purity might be even stronger for them.
