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APS Psychology Jeopardy Contest Wins Big
The APS Psychology Jeopardy contest was a big hit at the Carolinas Psychology Conference. The conference was held April 16 at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, and drew nearly 200 attendees. According to APS Fellow James Kalat, the Carolinas Psychology Conference began in 1977, sponsored by Meredith College and North Carolina State University. The psychology jeopardy contest has been an annual feature for approximately 20 years, and contestants are pairs of students from three colleges. The contest was created by Kalat, who writes the questions yearly. All the questions relate in some way to psychology.
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Surprising Authors of Psychological Studies
When we think of famous psychological scientists, names like Tim Duncan, Albert Einstein, and the Dalai Lama don’t typically come to mind. The field of psychological science is expansive and popular among researchers and universities, but unbeknownst to most, actors like Lisa Kudrow, Natalie Portman, and Colin Firth, politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Ben Carson, and even one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, have published work in psychology. A recent article in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Clinical Psychological Science Editor Scott O.
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Learning With Amnesia
Actors are a group of people rife for research opportunities because their profession requires that they remember vast amounts of ever-changing information — and recite that information at a moment’s notice. In a recent study in the journal Cortex, researchers Michael Kopelman (Kings College London) and John Morton (University College London) used the unique experiences of an actor with amnesia to better understand learning in individuals affected by the syndrome. In the past 15 years, several studies have examined the impact of hippocampal and medial temporal damage on the learning of semantic information — information relating to general facts and meaning.
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Science of Implicit Bias to Be Focus of US Law Enforcement Training
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced this week that it will formally integrate findings from psychological science into new training curricula for more than 28,000 DOJ employees as a way of combating implicit bias among law enforcement agents and prosecutors. The training program began rolling out Monday and is expected to continue through 2017. Accumulated evidence from decades of psychological research has shown that even when individuals do not show outward bias toward individuals from certain groups, they often show evidence of implicit bias – or bias that influences behavior in subtle ways that operate outside of conscious awareness.
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NIH Simplifies IRB Procedures for Multisite Studies
Multisite research collaborations can lead to significant discoveries, but they are also a challenge for many reasons, including logistical ones. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have introduced a new policy to streamline one aspect of these valuable projects: Now, multisite, NIH-funded studies conducting the same experiment are required to use only a single institutional review board (IRB) to oversee the research. This new policy begins May 25, 2017, and affects NIH-funded multisite studies which intend to use the same experimental protocol.
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How Language ‘Framing’ Influences Decision-Making
The way information is presented, or “framed,” when people are confronted with a situation can influence decision-making.
