Bringing you news and information about psychological
science and scientists throughout the world

 September 2013

APS President Elizabeth A. Phelps highlights the maturation of neuroscience and explores what’s next in psychological science. More>>

  

 

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Being Poor Places Heavy Burden on Mental Capacity

Poverty is like a tax on the brain. A study of cognitive reasoning across income groups may explain why low-income people seem to have a harder time with certain tasks that require focus or planning. More>>  

 

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The Presumptuous
Power Holder

Scientists Jennifer Overbeck and Vitaliya Droutman point to Louis XIV as an extreme example of power holders who objectify others. They hypothesized, in Psychological Science, that powerful people are prone to self-anchoring. More>>
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According to research presented in two reports in Psychological Science, anxiety can impair our accuracy on face- and word-recognition tasks, providing another possible source of fallibility in eyewitness testimony. More>> 

The Latest Perspectives
Now Online

This issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science features articles on social class and ethics, abstraction, and stress and physical health, as well as the second part of a special section celebrating 25 years of APS.  

Small Nudge, 

Big Impact

 
Habit, convenience, and temptation often hamper our attempts at self-improvement. But behavioral science is showing that those same forces can be rerouted. Read this cover story, and the September Observer online or as a PDF.

Editor’s Choice

European Journal of Personality 

Vol. 27(3), 271-279

Selected by Wendy Johnson

Child Personality as Moderator of Outcome in a School-Based Intervention for Preventing Externalising Behaviour

Sabine Stoltz, Peter Prinzie, Amaranta De Haan, Monique van Londen, Bram Orobio De Castro, and Maja Deković

 

All children are aggressive at one time or anotherbut children who display high levels of aggression are at risk for a number of negative outcomes such as school failure, drug use, and delinquency. Sabine Stoltz of Utrecht University and coauthors were interested in whether children’s personality traits would influence the degree to which they benefited from interventions for aggression. Their findings are promising because they show that school-based interventions can reduce aggressive behavior in children, and because they highlight the importance of considering child personality when researching and applying interventions for aggressive behavior. More>>

 

Each Global Observer features an article from a distinguished international journal. See past selections in the Editor’s Choice archive.