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Smell of Success: Scents Affect Thoughts, Behaviors
LiveScience: WASHINGTON — Suit pressed, mind ready and resume in hand. When preparing for a job interview, most people take every precaution to convey the best impression possible. But aside from body odor, not many people pay attention to the odors that surround them. That onion-laden lunch could give your potential boss-to-be the wrong impression, according to new research presented in May at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting. "There's a lot of research that's begun now, where people are looking at how the environment affects our well-being," said Jeannette Haviland-Jones, of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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Anxiety makes searchers miss multiple objects
Times of India: A new study has found that a person scanning baggage or X-rays can miss out on multiple objects during searches if they were feeling anxious. Duke psychologists put a dozen students through a test in which they searched for particular shapes on a computer display, simulating the sort of visual searching performed by airport security teams and radiologists. Stephen Mitroff, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience who led the experiment, says this area of cognitive psychology is important for improving homeland security and healthcare. Read the whole story: Times of India
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Can Aptitude Tests Really Predict Your Performance?
Colleges, employers, and the military all use aptitude tests to predict how well someone might do. In recent years, some critics of these tests have said there isn’t much difference in performance above a certain level—that, above a certain threshold, everyone is more or less the same. Now, in a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the authors find that this isn’t true. Instead, the higher your score, the better you perform later. But some critics have said that the tests aren’t much use at the top end of the scale.
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Imagination Can Influence Perception
Imagining something with our mind’s eye is a task we engage in frequently, whether we’re daydreaming, conjuring up the face of a childhood friend, or trying to figure out exactly where we might have parked the car. But how can we tell whether our own mental images are accurate or vivid when we have no direct comparison? That is, how do we come to know and judge the contents of our own minds? Mental imagery is typically thought to be a private phenomenon, which makes it difficult to test people’s metacognition of – or knowledge about –their own mental imagery.
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Income Disparities May Be Making Americans Unhappy
U.S. News and World Report: THURSDAY, June 16 -- The growing gap between the richest Americans and everyone else is making many people with middle and low incomes unhappy, researchers have found. "Income disparity has grown a lot in the U.S., especially since the 1980s," study author Shigehiro Oishi, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, said in news release from the Association for Psychological Science. "With that, we've seen a marked drop in life satisfaction and happiness" among the 60 percent of Americans with low- and middle-class incomes, Oishi noted. Read the whole story: U.S. News and World Report
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To Feel Full Faster, Pretend You’re Eating Junk Food
LiveScience: WASHINGTON — Brainpower is more important in dieting than scientists realized — not just in battling cravings but in physically changing the body's reaction to the intake of food, according to a new study. Whether or not we consider a food to be healthy has a big impact on a protein our bodies release to control metabolism and appetite, a researcher discovered. Participants who thought they were drinking a calorie-packed shake showed much greater and quicker spikes in a gut hormone, making them feel full faster, than those who were drinking what they thought was something healthier.
