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Suicide: Where We Are, Where We’re Going, and What’s Keeping Us From Getting There
There is no area of research that brings a complex array of ethical issues into sharp focus more than conducting treatment trials when the focus is on decreasing suicidal behavior and preventing suicide. Historically, suicidal individuals have been excluded from treatment studies because their inclusion was thought to be unethical, unsafe, or too difficult to manage clinically. This presentation will discuss where the field of suicide intervention research started, the successes and failures we have encountered thus far, as well as the critical issues that still need to be addressed in order to move the field forward.
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Living in Pasteur’s Quadrant
How can psychological researchers balance the need to do basic science with their desire to be relevant to the questions and issues of their time? In his classic book‚ Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation‚ Daniel Stokes proposes an answer. Cross-cutting two dimensions — a quest for understanding and considerations of use — Stokes offers four quadrants that capture the areas of scientific progress. Pasteur’s quadrant contains “use-inspired” research that enhances our basic understanding of scientific phenomena at the same time that it offers answers to practical‚ real-world problems.
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The Sense of Style
Let’s face it: Most academics are terrible communicators. Why do the world’s most cerebral people find it so hard to convey their ideas? And how can we learn to do better? I suggest that the sciences of mind and language can provide guidance. Thoughtful writers and teachers should begin with a clear idealization of the simulated scenario in which they are communicating with their audience. And they must overcome The Curse of Knowledge: the inability to imagine what it’s like not to know what they do know.
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Non-verbal Communication
Nonverbal communication applies across different groups of people and even different species, and it varies within and between individual people, making it a prime candidate for an integrative science initiative, said Anne Maass (Universitá di Padova, Italy), who chaired an Integrative Science Symposium on the topic. Beatrice de Gelder (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) elaborated on cognitive neuroscience research investigating how we perceive emotional expression through the body, even outside awareness, while Klaus Scherer (University of Geneva, Switzerland) discussed the fundamental architecture of the emotion system and how our bodies and faces convey our appraisals of, and intent…
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Psychology in an Economic World
Poverty, wealth, and their cognitive, emotional, and neurochemical consequences dominated the discussion in the opening integrative science symposium at ICPS. Moderated by Daniel Cervone, who co-chairs the program committee for the event that kicked off March 12 in Amsterdam, scientists representing psychology, economics, and sociology shared a wealth of research findings on the various ways socioeconomic status correlates with brain development, decision-making, and emotional well-being. Sociologist Jürgen Schupp of the German Institute for Economic Research detailed the manifold psychological concepts that should factor into the development of relevant social and economic indicators.
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How Brains Think: The Embodiment Hypothesis
Humans understand complex aspects of their day-to-day experience through their bodies, says George Lakoff. The acclaimed cognitive linguist provides a comprehensive look at the nature of embodied structures in the brain and the application of cognitive and neural linguistics.
