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Peter Ayton: To Risk or Not to Risk
Peter Ayton, a researcher from City University London, UK, investigates how people make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Ayton will be speaking at the Invited Symposium Emotional Influences on Decision Making at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. Ayton’s talk in this symposium, Dread Risk: Terrorism and Bicycle Accidents, will discuss a claim made by Gigerenzer (2004) that dread evoked by the September 11, 2001 attacks prompted switching from flying to driving, producing additional road accidents causing 1,500 fatalities.
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Q & A With Eli Finkel – The Science Behind Online Dating (Part 2)
Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, is one of five authors on a new study in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The study, ‘Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science‘ is co-authored by Paul Eastwick of Texas A & M University, Benjamin Karney of UCLA, Harry Reis of the University of Rochester and Susan Sprecher of Illinois State University. We invited our Facebook and Twitter followers to submit their questions on love, relationships and online dating to Finkel. Here is the second part of his response. Check out Part 1 of the Q & A here!
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Behind the Music: Human Factors Rap
The Arch Laboratory at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA is the main research and training facility of the graduate program in Human Factors and Applied Cognition. Arch Lab members conduct research in attention, audition, biological motion, eye movements, imagery, memory, and visual perception as applied to such domains as automation, aviation, driving, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Students and faculty created this video for a Human Factors and Ergonomics Society video contest in 2011 to help explains what human factors is.
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Heritability in the Era of Molecular Genetics
Today it seems to be common knowledge that most behavioral and psychological traits have a heritable genetic component. But what does it really mean when a study says that the heritability of Trait X is 46%? Do you know? Do researchers know? According to a review written by psychological scientists Wendy Johnson (University of Edinburgh), Lars Penke (University of Minnesota), and Frank Spinath (Saarland University), the excitement over research describing the heritability of behavioral and psychological traits has overshadowed many of the limitations of what these values can tell us.
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A ‘Bite-Size’ Rebuttal
In the January 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, two articles were published in which the authors argued that the trend of increasingly shorter journal articles could have a negative impact on research efforts. Two of the authors, Marco Bertamini and Marcus Munafò, later reiterated their arguments in an editorial published in The New York Times on January 28, 2012. Their column has been reprinted below along with a response from the current Editor and four former Editors of Psychological Science. We invite you to read their points and determine for yourself what “bite-sized” science means for psychological science.
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Facets of Mindfulness as Predictors of Gratitude
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Tony Ahrens from American University present his poster session research on "Facets of Mindfulness as Predictors of Gratitude: A Daily Diary Study.” Tony Ahrens is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at American University. His research interests fall at the interface of social and clinical psychology, with an emphasize on gratitude, mindfulness, and fear of emotion. In this study, trait gratitude in students was measured and then students were asked to complete daily dairy entries about something good that happened that day that neither they or anyone else caused.
