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Your Brain Is Not for Thinking
APS Past-President/ Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett Five hundred million years ago, a tiny sea creature changed the course of history: It became the first predator. It somehow sensed the presence of another creature nearby, propelled or wiggled its way over, and deliberately ate it. This new activity of hunting started an evolutionary arms race. Over millions of years, both predators and prey evolved more complex bodies that could sense and move more effectively to catch or elude other creatures. Eventually, some creatures evolved a command center to run those complex bodies. We call it a brain. ...
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on cultures of sustainability, cognitive-bias modification to treat addiction, probabilistic biases, cognitive training, the development of working memory, acquisition of fears and phobias, and a sleep-and-memory research program.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on the effect of smartphone use on academic performance, memory for stressful events, posture and Stroop effect, immunity and cognition, number perception, decisions in loss and gain domains, the protective effect of positivity on memory decline.
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Losing Control: How Lack of Sleep Allows Unpleasant Thoughts to Intrude
Unwanted memories can intrude on our thoughts from time to time, but new research suggests that a lack of sleep can greatly impair our ability to suppress these unpleasant and unwanted thoughts. Researcher Scott Cairney
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on paranoia, effort-based decisions and depression, sleep and suppression of unwanted thoughts, self-talk and emotion regulation, social cognition in schizophrenia, working memory and emotion regulation, and emotional eating.
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Losses. Loom. Large. And That, in Short, Explains Your Loss Aversion.
Kai Ruggeri is an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and he has a proposition for you. Would you like a guaranteed $90? Or a 90% chance of $100? I personally went with the guaranteed $90. (I didn’t get the actual money this is conceptual!) And so would most people. For getting only ten more dollars, we wouldn’t risk the other 90, even with those odds. “When the differences are small, we don’t like to take risks with gains (but we do for losses),” Ruggeri said. “When the differences become larger, that changes,” he said, armed with a new set of propositions. ...
