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Hungry? Low Blood Sugar May Increase Support for Social Welfare
Think “Hunger Games” and you’ll undoubtedly think of heroine Katniss Everdeen fighting against a totalitarian state in the blockbuster series of books and movies. Fortunately for us, those Hunger Games are entirely fictional, but new research suggests that we may have developed a different kind of real-world “hunger games” as a way of getting others to share a particularly precious resource: Food.
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Holiday Travelers Take Note: Scientists Explore Roadway Aggression
It’s that time of year again – the time to gather with family and friends, to celebrate the passing of another year…to spend hours in a car dealing with pent-up roadway aggression? According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, long-distance trips increase by 54% in the 6-day period surrounding Thanksgiving and by 23% in the weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. Most of those trips take place in personal automobiles. Being stuck in traffic on a regular day is frustrating enough, but racing to be home for the holidays could make driving at this time of year a particularly fraught endeavor.
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Memory Science and the Kennedy Assassination
In the same way a flash camera captures a moment in time, decisive events create vivid, long-lasting, and poignant memories. And many of those memories are wrong.
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Visual System ‘Prioritizes’ Information for Conscious Access
We are continuously flooded with sensory information from our physical environment – the sights, sounds, smells, feel of everything around us. We’re flooded with so much information, in fact, that we’re not consciously aware of much of it. “Considering that people are continuously presented with vast amounts of sensory information, a system is needed to select and prioritize the most relevant information,” Surya Gayet and colleagues write. The researchers surmised that, in the case of vision, visual working memory (VWM) may be that selection system.
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Childhood Poverty Linked With Worse Mental Health in Emerging Adulthood
About 1 in 4 children in the United States spend some or even all of their early childhood in poverty, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. What does this early exposure to poverty mean for mental health outcomes when these children enter their teens and early 20s? Psychological scientists Gary Evans and Rochelle Cassells set out to explore this question, using data from almost 200 participants involved in a longitudinal study of rural poverty, cumulative risk, and child development. As they predicted, participants who spent more time in poverty in early childhood showed signs of worse mental health in emerging adulthood.
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Perspectives Reviews 25 Years of Science
The journal Perspectives on Psychological Science continues to recognize the 25th anniversary of APS by featuring a series of special sections that take a look at how the field has changed over the last 25 years. The special section in the November issue includes articles that explore a wide range of topics, including the science of well-being, the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, advances in research on autism and dyslexia, integrative approaches to understanding the brain on stress, psychological perspectives on cardiovascular diseases, the challenge of examining health disparities, and the development of parent-training programs.
