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World Series Psychology
The Red Sox won’t be participating in this year’s World Series, but it’s safe to say that the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is here to stay. That makes those teams’ fans an obvious choice for studying rivalry and aggression. Read Wray Herbert’s summary of what happened when Princeton University social neuroscientists studied which neurons light up when loyalists and rivals experience moments of victory or defeat. In other baseball-related psychology, fans aren’t the only ones whose aggression at the baseball stadium has become the subject of psychological research.
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How to Learn by Believing In Yourself
If you want to be smarter, the first step might be to believe that you can get smarter. In a study that will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, Jason S. Moser and his colleagues found that people who believe they can learn from their mistakes are more likely to do so. In the study, participants were asked to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series like “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” This task may seem simple, but task is repeated several times in a row, people tend to make mistakes and feel bad about it.
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Loving the iPhone? Thank Steve Jobs and Human-Computer Interactions
iTechnologies pave the way for new fields of psychological science The late Steve Jobs is considered the Thomas Edison of our time. His innovations not only sold in a down economy, but the technology created by Jobs revolutionized the way we live our lives and interact with others. With the anticipated release of the iPhone4, a New York Times op-ed by Martin Lindstrom said that brain scans of participants who saw a vibrating iPhone “responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member. In short, the subject didn't demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction.
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<em>Psychological Science</em> Authors Honored With Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
Watching Nobel laureates dancing the sirtaki and witnessing a flight of 1,200 paper airplanes were two of the unconventional events used to honor the winners of the 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes. Among the winners were Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe, and Luk Warlop, who received this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for research demonstrating that people with full bladders make less impulsive choices. Their work was published earlier this year in Psychological Science. At first, Tuk wasn’t sure what to make of the prize. “I was curious to what extent this reward only highlights hilarious research [as opposed to] serious research, which mine was in the end.
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Longitudinal Impacts of 3-D Spatial Training Among Gifted STEM Undergraduates
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch APSSC Award Winner David I. Miller from the University of California, Berkeley present his research on “Longitudinal Impacts of 3-D Spatial Training Among Gifted Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Undergraduates.” David I. Miller University of California, Berkeley Diane F. Halpern Claremont McKenna College According to Miller’s presentation, twelve hours of spatial training improved gifted students’ performance in a physics class by approximately one-third of a letter grade. The improvement was particularly pronounced in male students.
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Spoiling the Ending Doesn’t Spoil the Story
People hate to know the ending before they’ve read the story or watched the movie. At least that’s what they think. A study in the September issue of Psychological Science reveals that contrary to this popular belief, knowing the ending actually enhances readers’ enjoyment of a story.
