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Using Your Brain to Get Smarter
We may inherit a good deal of our intelligence, but that doesn't mean a person can't get any smarter. That is the upshot of the ongoing cognitive research presented by John Jonides of the University of Michigan during the William James Fellow Award Address this morning at the APS 23rd Annual Convention. "Fluid intelligence is often thought to be highly heritable, and some people draw the conclusion that it is immutable, and I hope to disabuse you of that idea today," Jonides said.
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Do We Dare to Change America’s Diet?
In his Bring the Family Address at the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Kelly D. Brownell of Yale University charged convention-goers to ask themselves whether we have the courage necessary to change America’s diet. Brownell, a psychological scientist and Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, argued that this courage is essential because of the many obstacles – including powerful economic forces – that stand in the way of promoting health in the United States. Over the last 25 years, the rate of obesity has risen dramatically in the United States.
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Feel Great, Meditate
We all know that levitating off the ground when you meditate is just a myth, but there is lots of scientific research to back-up the idea that meditation can improve our lives. At the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Katherine MacLean of the University of California, Davis, Bethany Kok of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Catherine Ortner of Thompson Rivers University in Canada, and Matthew Hunsinger from Mary Baldwin College led a symposia on the affective, cognitive, and social benefits of meditation.
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News from Psychological Science: A Conversation Between David Brooks and Walter Mischel
David Brooks is a featured New York Times columnist and a regular on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In his NY Times columns "Social Science Palooza" I and II, he summarized examples of recent findings in the scholarly study of human behavior and concluded, "A day without social science is like a day without sunshine." In this conversation hour, Brooks and social psychology legend Walter Mischel talked about what's exciting them in psychological science and why it matters outside the academy.
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Symposia Sunday: Messy Morality
Morality is not a universal constant. For example, why would the government of Spain give human rights to chimps in 2007, yet other governments continue to hand out licenses for hunting seal pups? In a symposium today, three researchers discussed their efforts to investigate individual variation in morality. One way to account for differences in morality is genetics. Abigail Marsh, a researcher from Georgetown University, shared her latest results from a study where she and her team correlated genetic alleles for a serotonin transporter called SLC6A4 with participants’ responses to moral scenarios. Participants were asked to respond to dilemmas with various outcomes.
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Children Prefer Peers Who Share Their Beliefs (APSSC Award Winner)
My name is Larisa Heiphetz from Harvard University and I presented my research at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. In two studies on belief-based preference, 6-9-year-old children reported preferences for religious in-group members and for peers who shared their religious, factual, and preference-based beliefs. These experiments demonstrate preferential treatment in children when others differ in mental states rather than perceptual cues. Poster Session IX - Board: IX- EA002 Saturday, May 28, 2011, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM Columbia Hall Larisa Heiphetz Harvard University Elizabeth S. Spelke Harvard University Mahzarin R. Banaji Harvard University
