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Standing in Your Own Way
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Jared M. Bartels from the University of Minnesota present his poster session research on “Fear of Failure, Self-Handicapping, and Negative Emotions.” Bartels and his co-author William E. Herman wanted to find out whether self-handicapping, reduces negative emotional responses to failure. An example of self-handicapping would be thinking to yourself that you are not good at public speaking, and then doing poorly on a presentation. Bartels and Herman studied participants’ responses to scenarios that incorporated academic failure with and without self-handicapping.
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Science on Love (and Hate, Too) at the APS Convention
Although Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, psychological scientists study love all year round — and it’s not always pretty. In this video, Douglas T. Kenrick discusses his book Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life. Plan to see Kenrick and others present research on love, sex, online dating, and more at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. Passionate Love: Looking Back and Looking Ahead Elaine Hatfield will talk about how research on passionate love and sexual desire has evolved over the last 50 years. Hatfield will be introduced by Ellen Berscheid, with whom she will share the 2012 APS William James Fellow Award.
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Language as a Window into Human Nature
Steven Pinker shows us how the mind turns the finite building blocks of language into infinite meanings. Watch here
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Science on Swearing
Timothy Jay knows enough about curse words to make any seven-year-old jealous. The Boston Globe has called him the “Doctor of dirty words,” and he frequently appears in news stories — like this one from the Today Show — to discuss swearing. Even though swearing is frowned upon, research that Jay published in Perspectives on Psychological Science shows that profane language is everywhere, and it has an important purpose. Taboo words pack a lot of emotion, and this allows them to achieve certain goals, such as conveying frustration or humor, more easily than non-taboo words.
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Romantic Jealousy and Self-Esteem
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the 23rd APS Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Jessica L. Bowler from Pitzer College present her poster session research on “Self-Esteem and Components of Romantic Jealousy.” Bowler distributed a survey that described four scenarios designed to induce romantic jealousy. Then she analyzed participants’ responses in relation to self-esteem. She found that participants with high self-esteem were less likely to be jealous after reading the scenarios. Participants with low self-esteem were likely to become more insecure, more anxious, more distressed, and less trusting in response to hypothetical infidelity situations.
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Kids Show How Society Thinks
Psychological scientist Margaret Beale Spencer says that children can teach us a lot about the society in which they’re raised. “Our children are always near us because we are a society, and what we put out there, kids report back. You ask the question, they’ll give you the answer.” In 2010, CNN commissioned Spence to lead a pilot study examining children’s attitudes toward race. The test she designed involved 133 black and white children from different economic and regional backgrounds in the United States. The young students in Spencer’s study saw drawings of five children whose skin color ranged from dark to light.
