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Give And Take: How The Rule Of Reciprocation Binds Us
NPR: In 1974, Phillip Kunz and his family got a record number of Christmas cards. In the weeks before Christmas they came daily, sometimes by the dozen. Kunz still has them in his home, collected in an old photo album. "Dear Phil, Joyce and family," a typical card reads, "we received your holiday greeting with much joy and enthusiasm ... Merry Christmas and Happy New Year's. Love Lou, Bev and the children." The cards from that year came in all shapes and sizes, but the basic message was the same. The writers wanted Kunz to know that he and his family were cared for, and also they wanted to share their own news.
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Solving for X, Among the Neurons
I have a fence that needs scraping and painting, and I’m pretty sure I can do the whole job in six hours. My friend Jack, who is an experienced painter, wants me to hire him. He promises he can have a new coat of paint on the fence in four hours. I’m tempted, but I’m wondering, what if Jack and I work together? If he does the trim and other detail work, and I do the easy brushing, we should be able to wrap this job up by lunchtime, easy. But how long will it take, exactly? This is what, in algebra, we call a “word problem.” I always loved word problems when I was in school, because unlike a lot of math, they seemed connected to natural situations that actually occur in real life.
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Stop acting on impulse
Times Higher Education: Research has shown that people can train their brains to become less impulsive. Psychologists at the universities of Exeter and Cardiff assessed whether asking people to refrain from certain movements while in a simulated gambling situation affected how reckless or cautious they were when betting. The results suggest that training people to inhibit their movements could boost or prime a system in the brain that regulates inhibition across a range of functions. The paper, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that more work on the topic could lead to treatments for addiction. Read the whole story: Times Higher Education
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Memory, Judgment, and Neuroeconomics—Insights from Current Directions in Psychological Science
Current Directions in Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, offers a unique perspective on developments taking place across the many different areas of psychological science. New reports from the June issue of the journal examine how people retrieve memories from their minds, a new model of how working memory works, how we judge each other’s personalities, and a multi-disciplinary field of study that merges behavior and economics. Retrieval-Based Learning: Active Retrieval Promotes Meaningful Learning Scientists who study learning tend to investigate how memories are formed during learning. But Jeffrey D.
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NSF Gives Clinical Students a Shot At Winning Graduate Fellowships
Science Magazine: In 2010, after years of tolerating an ambiguous policy on whether clinical or counseling psychology fits into the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF's) mission to fund basic science, agency officials announced that they would reject any application—without even reviewing it—from students in clinical or counseling psychology graduate programs. The psychological science community protested the decision, and within a year, NSF had restored eligibility for scores of graduate psychology students. The reversal has had a significant impact: A doctoral student in psychology has won a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship.
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SBE Advisory Committee Holds Meeting
COSSA Washington Update: Mumpower New SES Division Director Myron Gutmann, the current AD for SBE, updated the Committee on the directorate's activities. He announced the appointment of Jeryl Mumpower, currently at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, as the new director of the Social and Economic Sciences (SES) division. Mumpower, a former program officer for Decision, Risk, and Management Science, will replace Rachel Croson, who will return to the University of Texas at Dallas in September after two years at NSF. Mumpower previously taught and served in administrative positions at Albany University, State University of New York. He has a Ph.D.
