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First Latin American Congress for the Advancement of Psychological Science
This event was supported by the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, which invites applications for nonrenewable grants of up to $5,000 to launch new, educational projects in psychological science. Proposals are due October 1 and March 1. At a first-of-its-kind meeting, scientists based in Latin America and beyond shared research and training as well as media and public policy strategies.
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What’s “Fair” Depends on Where You Come From
The mentality that “you get what you earn” is widely accepted as what is “fair” in most Western societies. But is this concept of distributive justice universally considered fair, or is it a culture-bound phenomenon? Marie Schӓfer and colleagues wanted find out. Their research, recently published in Psychological Science, examined how children in three different societies made merit distributions. The researchers chose to look at German children as a representation of modern Western culture, children from the Samburu African tribe to represent gerontocratic society (rule by elders), and children from the ≠All Hai||om African tribe to represent an egalitarian society.
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A Tutorial on Evaluating Hypotheses Using Bayesian Methods
What do black bears have in common with Bayesian statistics? Both make an appearance in a 2013 paper written by Rens Van de Schoot, Marjolein Verhoeven, and Herbert Hoijtink in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. In this paper, the authors use a hiking trip to illustrate Bayesian thinking and its advantages over traditional, sometimes called frequentist, statistics. During a hiking trip in Alaska, one of the Dutch authors observed a bit of black fur behind some bushes. Was it a bear?
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Psychosis and Violence Aren’t Strongly Linked
Violent individuals are often assumed to suffer from a long history of mental illness that compels them to act destructively, but the link between psychosis and aggressive acts may be weak.
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Perspectives on Psychological Science
Perspectives on Psychological Science: Volume 10, Number 4 Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, publishes an eclectic mix of provocative reports and articles, including broad integrative reviews, overviews of research programs, meta-analyses, theoretical statements, opinion pieces about major issues in the field, and even occasional humorous essays and sketches.
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A New You: Behavior Change May Drive Personality Change
Do you want to be more productive at work? Do you want to stop worrying so much, or to be more compassionate toward others? If so, you’re not the only one — judging, that is, by the number of self-help books and seminars that tout personality-change regimens. But what does it really take to alter your personality? In a 2014 article published in the European Journal of Personality, researchers Marie Hennecke (University of Zurich), Wiebke Bleidorn (University of California, Davis), Jaap Denissen (Humboldt-University Berlin), and Dustin Wood (Wake Forest University) presented a framework describing three preconditions for self-directed personality change.
