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Die Sicherheit des Status quo
Wiener Zeitung: "Gott soll einen behüten vor allem, was noch ein Glück war", zitiert Friedrich Torberg seine Tante Jolesch. Mit seinen Büchern über die Tante Jolesch er nicht nur seiner Jugend und dem jüdischen Leben im Wien und Prag der Zwischenkriegszeit, sondern auch dem Schönreden ein Denkmal gesetzt. Wer vom zweiten Stock aus dem Fenster fällt und nicht tot auf dem Pflaster landet sondern in einem Misthaufen, hat noch ein Glück gehabt. Und wem der Bäcker sagt, dass sein geliebtes Rauchfangkehrerbrot aus ist, auch. Das Brot würde eh nur blähen, wenn er es hätte. Wenn eine Katastrophe gerade noch verhindert wurde, reden wir das Resultat schön.
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Because You Said So?
The Epoch Times: Adults rely heavily on verbal labels to identify objects and understand the world around them, and scientists have long believed that children’s minds work the same way. A new study from Ohio State University, however, suggests otherwise. “As adults, we know that words are very predictive,” said study co-author Vladimir Sloutsky in an Ohio State news report. “If you use words to guide you, they won’t often let you down.” For example, if you see an object that looks like a pen, but someone tells you that it is a tape recorder, you might be inclined to believe it and start searching for the microphone or a power switch, he explained.
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Peter Kuppens
University of Leuven, Belgium http://ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/people/Peter_Kuppens/byYearType/ What does your research focus on? I study emotions, specifically I’ve been trying to make sense of the patterns with which our emotions change across time, and what we can learn from them to understand what makes people happy or miserable. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? My answer to the first question is silly: I applied for a PhD position on the topic of anger and got the job.
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Paul E. Dux
University of Queensland, Australia www.paulduxlab.org What does your research focus on? Our world constantly serves up far more sensory information than can be processed at the level of awareness. Thus, it is vital that humans are able to sort the important information from the irrelevant, and select the correct responses to this information from a veritable plethora of options. These tasks are thought to be undertaken by the attention system and I am interested in understanding the cognitive and neural underpinnings of this system and, in particular, the mechanism(s) that give rise to the capacity limitations of attention.
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Phillip Atiba Goff
Executive Director of Research, Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity www.policingequity.org University of California, Los Angeles www.psych.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty_page?id=147&area=7 What does your research focus on? My research focuses on contemporary racial and gender discrimination, particularly in the domain of criminal justice. It is inspired by a single question: How does one explain persistent racial inequality in the face of declining explicit racial prejudice? This question summarizes the conundrum of many contemporary intergroup conflicts and presents difficult practical and theoretical challenges to traditional psychological approaches to bias and discrimination.
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Nash Unsworth
University of Oregon, USA http://maidlab.uoregon.edu/index.html What does your research focus on? My research focuses on working memory, attention control, long-term memory retrieval and individual differences in those processes. In particular, our work focuses on how individuals rely on attention to actively maintain information over the short term and how they retrieve information from long-term memory when that information could not be maintained. Furthermore, a major focus of our work is to examine individual differences in these processes and to determine how they are related to higher-order cognitive processes such as intelligence and reasoning. What drew you to this line of research?