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Higher Implicit Self-Esteem Linked to Positive Evaluation of Spouses
It’s often said that we can’t love others unless we love ourselves. According to a new study, this may be true, but perhaps in a different way than we expect -- while our reported self-esteem doesn’t predict changes in our implicit, or underlying, feelings about a significant other, our implicit attitudes about ourselves do. Research has suggested that self-esteem influences how people behave in their relationships: Those with higher self-esteem believe that their partner views them positively and so are more inclined to work at their relationships. In other studies, however, self-esteem didn’t seem to predict relationship satisfaction down the road. Psychological scientist James K.
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The Process of Problem Solving
People encounter problems every day. Some problems, such as solving the daily Sudoku puzzle, are enjoyable, while others, like figuring out how to retrieve the keys you just locked in the car, are not. Although researchers have examined problem solving, there is still a lot we don’t know about how we strategically work through problems. In a 2013 article published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Ngar Yin Louis Lee (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and APS William James Fellow Philip N. Johnson-Laird (Princeton University) examined the ways people develop strategies to solve related problems.
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Learning for Survival? Venom Overrides Other Snake Categories
We deal with the world around us by putting it into categories. We are constantly trying to understand the things we encounter by classifying them: Is this a food I really like, one that I would eat only if I were starving, or something I won’t go near? Is this creepy-crawly thing an insect, a spider, or some other form of arthropod? “Virtually every item can fall into a number of broader or more specific categories, and some levels may be more important to know than others,” write researchers Sharon Noh and colleagues in an article published in Psychological Science.
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Sleep May Help the Brain Integrate New Language Skills
Scientists have understood for decades that the brain is “plastic,” meaning that our neural connections change and adapt in response to new experiences. One factor that seems to play a particular role in language plasticity
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Taking an Integrative Approach to Understanding Emotions and Clinical Disorders
Many clinical psychological disorders, including anxiety and depression, are characterized by unhealthy, turbulent, or otherwise maladaptive emotions. Yet the link between emotion and mental illness has typically been investigated separately from basic research on emotion and emotional experience. A Special Series on Emotions and Psychopathology in the new issue of Clinical Psychological Science aims to link these two areas of investigation, bringing the most recent research from affective science to bear on the ways that clinicians and researchers think about, diagnose, and treat clinical disorders.
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Priming Gender Norms and Levels of Heterosexism as Predictors of Adoption Choices
In this study, my colleagues and I were interested in how priming gender norms and one’s level of heterosexism can affect decisions about which couple can adopt a child. We tested this by priming people with either gender normative or gender non-normative pictures. We primed a control group with nature scenes. After priming, we presented each participant with an adoption scenario in which they were asked to choose one of three couples to adopt a child. The three couples were a heterosexual couple, a same-sex male couple, and a same-sex female couple.
