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How Shocking Will Others Find Lady Gaga?
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Troy Campbell from Duke University presents his research “How Shocking Will Others Find Lady Gaga? Desensitization Via Repetition Biases Predictions.” The more experience you have, the wiser you are, right? Troy Campbell and colleagues at Duke University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago found the opposite was true. Repeated exposure to jokes, pictures of Lady Gaga, sports photography, art, and a painful noise can actually make people worse at predicting how other people would experience the content.
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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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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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Sweet Revenge: Gustatory Experience and Vengeful Action
In case you missed it the cameras were rolling! Jens H. Hellmann from University of Münster, Germany presented his research at the APS 24th Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, USA in English and German. English German: The present experiment examined whether "revenge tastes sweet": We found that the evaluation of a vengeful act was more positive when participants had a sweet (vs. neutral) taste in their mouths. Furthermore, this relatively more positive evaluation did not emerge when the motive for the evaluated action was not revenge. Jens H. Hellmann University of Münster, Germany Deborah F. Thoben Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, Germany
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New Opportunities Using Social Media in Teaching and Research
The goal of our poster was to encourage instructors to venture into the world of social media in both their teaching and research activities. Mentioning the use of social media in the classroom raises the specter of “friending” students, and we want to make sure that instructors know about the many other (more appropriate) opportunities. Why should we do this at all? Using social media provides the advantages of meeting students on familiar ground (not stuffy, artificial e-class discussion boards), preparing them for the workplace (most jobs and job searches now involve social media), and allowing us to model good reputation management skills, information competency, and critical thinking.
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How Students and Teachers Relate
How a teacher relates to his or her students has tremendous influence on a student’s learning experience. So Matthew G. Mandelbaum of Fordham University and PsySoEd Dynamics, LLC asked childhood and early-childhood educators about the approaches they use in their classrooms to solve problems and maintain motivation. He asked whether they would develop a new curriculum in an adventurous or a structured style, if they typically seek to develop deep relationships with students (relational approach), and if they pursued professional development opportunities (mastery). In general, he found that teachers who were adventurous were also more relational.
