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Alcohol, Mood and Me (Not You)
Thanks in part to studies that follow subjects for a long time, psychologists are learning more about differences between people. In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the author describes how psychologists can use their data to learn about the different ways that people's minds work. Most psychology research is done by asking a big group of people the same questions at the same time.
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Taking Safety Personally
A year after the BP explosion and oil spill, those trying to find someone to blame are misguided, says psychological scientist E. Scott Geller, Alumni Distinguished professor at Virginia Tech, and author of a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Geller has spent much of his 42-year career developing interventions to keep people safe, particularly helping companies develop a culture that promotes occupational safety.
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Psychological Scientists Ask How Well—or Badly—We Remember Together
The social nature of memory has fast become a keen and enduring area of interest for cognitive scientists.
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Ostracism hurts—but how? Shedding light on a silent, invisible abuse
Humans need to belong. Yet they also commonly leave others out. Animals abandon the weakest to ensure the survival of the fittest. So do kindergartners and ’tweens, softball players and office workers. Common though they are, rejection and exclusion hurt. Endured for a long time, ostracism leaves people feeling depressed and worthless, resigned to loneliness or desperate for attention—in extreme cases, suicidal or homicidal. Yet ostracism “was essentially ignored by social scientists for 100 years,” says Purdue University psychologist Kipling D. Williams.
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When It Comes To Infidelity, Does Power Trump Gender?
Infidelity may have more to do with feelings of power, and the confidence that comes with it, than it has to do with gender, researchers find.
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It’s All About Control
Having power over others and having choices in your own life share a critical foundation: control, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The paper finds that people are willing to trade one source of control for the other. For example, if people lack power, they clamor for choice, and if they have an abundance of choice they don’t strive as much for power. "People instinctively prefer high to low power positions," says M. Ena Inesi of London Business School.