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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Effect of Relative Encoding on Memory-Based Judgments Marissa A. Sharif and Daniel M. Oppenheimer Some theories of decision making suggest that when people encode a stimulus, they represent where the stimulus lies in a distribution rather than the absolute value of the stimulus. How does this tendency to represent information as relative rather than absolute influence decision making? In several studies, participants -- at two timepoints -- evaluated sound clips, the speed of toy cars, or the number of butterflies landing on flowers.
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Replication Project Investigates Self-Control as Limited Resource
A new research replication project, involving 24 labs and over 2100 participants, failed to reproduce findings from a previous study that suggested that self-control is a depletable resource.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Blunted Reward Processing in Remitted Melancholic Depression Anna Weinberg and Stewart A. Shankman Few reliable markers for vulnerability to major depressive disorder (MDD) have been identified, despite its prevalence. This may be due to the variety of subgroups and symptom clusters subsumed under the MDD diagnosis.
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Witnesses Confuse Innocent and Guilty Suspects with ‘Unfair’ Lineups
Police lineups in which distinctive individual marks or features are not altered can impair witnesses’ ability to distinguish between innocent and guilty suspects.
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Distinct Stages of Thinking Revealed by Brain Activity Patterns
Neuroimaging data can reveal the mental stages people go through as they are solving challenging math problems, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. By combining two analytical strategies, researchers were able to use functional MRI to identify patterns of brain activity that aligned with four distinct stages of problem solving.
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Diversifying Science to Represent Diverse Populations
Despite increasing attention to issues of diversity in scientific research, participant populations in behavioral science tend to be relatively homogeneous. Understanding how people differ across various dimensions, and how those differences are driven by underlying psychological, biological, and social processes, is critical to building a rigorous and comprehensive clinical science. A special series in Clinical Psychological Science highlights the importance of broadening the traditional scope of clinical science research, advancing the field so that it can adequately address the needs and concerns of diverse populations.