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Board Member Lisa Feldman Barrett Receives Highest Canadian Scholarly Award
APS Board Member Lisa Feldman Barrett was recently elected to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC): The Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada. Barrett, who is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, received her PhD from the University of Waterloo. Her laboratory, the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, investigates the nature of emotion and the brain’s creation of the mind. Experiential, behavioral, psychophysiology, and brain-imaging methods are all used in her research. The Society consists of elected Canadian citizens or residents who have made outstanding contributions to the arts, humanities, sciences, and Canadian public life.
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The Rocky Road to a Sense of Self
Adolescents spend a lot of time figuring out who they are, and for good reason. A coherent concept of self — based on commitments, standards, and life roles — is associated with positive mental health outcomes. Now, a group of researchers in the Netherlands has fleshed out some of the details about relationships among identity, self, and mental health in young adolescents. The results appeared in the European Journal of Personality. Seth J. Schwartz and his coauthors collected data from 580 Dutch sixth graders.
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The Goal of Creativity
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the 24th APS Annual Convention. Marieke Roskes, University of Amsterdam, presented her research on overcoming the cognitive costs of creativity. If you struggle with creativity and feel exhausted after a creative task, then psychological scientists have good news for you. People who strive for success and positive outcomes (approach motivation) are often more creative than those who strive to avoid failure or negative outcomes (avoidance motivation). But individuals who are motivated by avoiding failure can be as creative as those who are striving for success if they need creativity to achieve their goal.
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New Directions in Brain Training: Effectiveness, Methodology, and Application of Cognitive Interventions
Workshop Announcement: "New directions in brain training - Effectiveness, methodology, and application of cognitive interventions" Berlin, Germany October 11-13, 2012 The aim of this workshop is to bring together experts and young scientists from different fields of psychology and neuroscience to establish, discuss and systematize the state of the art in the field. The workshop will focus on cognitive training and transfer effects of different interventions from cognitive, developmental, clinical, and neuropsychological perspectives.
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A More Inclusive Look at Singleness
Past research has found that single individuals are perceived more negatively than couples. However, in previous research on this topic, study participants have always rated targets who were presumably heterosexual because the target’s sexual orientation was not explicitly mentioned. In a recent study, APS Student Caucus Rise Award winner Gal Slonim and colleagues manipulated the sexual orientation of the targets to better understand whether the stigma associated with being single affects both heterosexual and homosexual targets in a similar manner.
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Not Obedience But Followership
It is commonly thought that participants in Milgram's shock experiments obeyed the researcher because of people's natural tendency to conform to those in authority. In this article, Reicher, Haslam, and Smith review findings from the original Milgram study that suggest a different conclusion: Participants obeyed because they identified with the experimenter. The authors describe their own study of the Milgram experiments and detail evidence supporting their suggestion. Perspectives on Psychological Science Working Toward the Experimenter: Reconceptualizing Obedience Within the Milgram Paradigm as Identification-Based Followership Stephen D. Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Joanne R.
