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Wrongful Convictions Can Be Reduced Through Science, But Tradeoffs Exist
WASHINGTON – Many of the wrongful convictions identified in a report this week hinged on a misidentified culprit -- and a new report in a top journal on psychological science reveals the paradox of reforms in eyewitness identification procedure. In our efforts to make sure that good guys don’t get locked up, we could let more bad guys go. In the May issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, leading scholars in psychology and the law explore and debate various aspects of eyewitness identification procedures, providing a scientific foundation for this important social issue.
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Timing Can Affect Whether Women and Minorities Face Discrimination
Timing can affect whether females and minorities experience discrimination -- says a study published today in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Emails were sent from fictional prospective doctoral students to 6,500 professors across 258 institutions, requesting a meeting either that day or next week. Prospective doctoral students with Caucasian male names were 26% more likely to be granted an appointment with a professor when requesting one for next week than those with names signaling that they were minorities (African American, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese) or females.
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Marketing Is More Effective When Targeted to Personality Profiles
Advertisements can be more effective when they are tailored to the unique personality profiles of potential consumers, research suggests.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about new research published in Psychological Science. Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness Pronobesh Banerjee, Promothesh Chatterjee, and Jayati Sinha Can the recollection of past ethical and unethical acts change a person's perception of brightness? Participants were asked to recall an ethical or an unethical event from their past.They were then asked to rate their preference for a number of items -- a lamp, a cracker, and a candle, for example -- and were asked to judge the brightness of the testing room.
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Facebook and Smartphones: New Tools for Psychological Science Research—News Brief
WASHINGTON -- Whether you’re an iPerson who can’t live without a Mac, a Facebook addict, or a gamer, you know that social media and technology say things about your personality and thought processes. And psychological scientists know it too – they’ve started researching how new media and devices both reveal and change our mental states. Two recent articles in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, explored how trends in technology are changing the questions psychological scientists are asking and the ways they ask them.
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Parents Are Happier People
Contrary to recent scholarship and popular belief, parents experience greater levels of happiness and meaning in life than people without children, according to researchers from the University of California, Riverside, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University. Parents also are happier during the day when they are caring for their children than during their other daily activities, the researchers found in a series of studies conducted in the United States and Canada. These findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science.