-
Learned Creativity — How to Innovate in the Classroom
When people think of innovative organizations, they may first jump to the business and technology fields. In the field of education, however, new governmental standards and reforms, as well as growing competition for resources and students, has made innovation increasingly important. Although innovation has increasingly become vital, not all organizations — schools included — have the same level of creative output. In a 2014 article published in the European Journal of Work Psychology, researchers Anna R.
-
Responsive Partners Show Two Kinds of Empathy
When stress sets in, many of us turn to a partner to help us manage, relying on the partner to provide a sounding board or shoulder to cry on. A new study on close relationships suggests that your odds of actually feeling better are much improved if your partner provides both of those things. The research, conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara reveals that simply understanding your partner’s suffering isn’t sufficient to be helpful in a stressful situation; you’ve got to actually care that they’re suffering in the first place.
-
Making Connections Within Text: A Review of Anaphor Resolution
In order to be a successful reader, one needs to not only be able to identify individual words, but also to create an ongoing representation of the events described throughout a text. One way this continuity is accomplished is though anaphor resolution. An anaphor is the word that refers to something that was previously introduced within the text. Take the following example: It had been a long day. The builders were exhausted. Eventually a truck arrived to help. They needed the vehicle because the load was so heavy. At last they could start work on the building. The word “vehicle” is the anaphor used to refer to the previously mentioned “truck” in the text.
-
Replication Effort Finds No Evidence That Grammatical Aspect Affects Perceived Intent
A multi-lab replication project found no evidence that the verb form used to describe a crime influences the way people judge criminal intent, in contrast to previously published findings. The Registered Replication Report (RRR), published in the January 2016 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, synthesizes the results from 12 independent replication attempts. In 2011, William Hart and Dolores Albarracín published a striking study in Psychological Science examining how the verb aspect in which a passage is written affects how that passage is interpreted.
-
What the Rise of Large Datasets Means for Psycholinguistics
The ability to crowdsource data from large groups and the rise of Big Data have helped advance many different areas of psychological research. The field of psycholinguistics — the study of the psychology behind the acquisition, use, production, and comprehension of language — is one of those areas. Such is the importance of Big Data to the field that it was the subject of a special issue, edited by Emmanuel Keuleers (Ghent University, Belgium) and APS Fellow David A. Balota (Washington University in St. Louis, USA) and published in a 2015 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
-
Fuzzy Thinking Gives Adolescents a Clearer View of Risk
Although many people make risky decisions, one group — adolescents — are the most likely to engage in risky behavior. According to one theory explaining the developmental trajectory of risky decision-making — the imbalance theory — this phenomenon is prevalent in adolescence partly because areas of the brain involved in reward mature before areas of the brain connected with behavioral inhibition and delay of gratification. In a recent article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, APS Fellow Valerie F. Reyna, Rebecca B.