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Careers and Leadership the Focus of New Psychological Science Blog
Countless professionals spend their workdays facing performance anxiety, low motivation, poor management, and burnout. Others have optimism, enthusiasm, and energy to reach substantial success.
Psychological scientists have amassed decades’ worth of research on these traits and behaviors, and on what factors foster an optimal work environment.
Now, APS has launched Minds for Business, a blog devoted exclusively to the study of work and leadership.
Minds for Business will feature the latest research on leadership and management issues in the modern workplace. It’s an indispensable resource for professionals wanting to better understand the behavioral, social and cognitive dynamics that affect their careers, their organizations, and their life satisfaction. Topics include proven negotiation strategies, motivation, effective management practices, optimal team design, gender and racial bias in professional settings, and financial judgment.
An additional feature on the site, At the End…
Tags: Advertising/Marketing, Decision Making, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Judgment, Motivation | No Comments »
Sensory Memory Can Improve Decision Making
Conventional wisdom holds that your memory of an experience is strongest right when it’s encoded – after all, if over a century of memory research has taught us anything, it’s that memory traces typically decay over time.
But new research published in the September 2013 issue of Psychological Science suggests that a brief delay between seeing a stimulus and having to make a decision about that stimulus can improve the accuracy of our decision making, even if we don’t receive any new information about what the stimulus looked like in the meantime.
This new research adds an interesting twist to previous findings by revealing that, for a short amount of time afterward, sensory memory can actually enhance recognition of what we’ve just been exposed to.
In their study, psychological scientists Alexandra Vlassova and Joel Pearson…
Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Decision Making, Perception, Psychological Science, Short-Term Memory, Visual Memory, Visual Perception | No Comments »
Perspectives Looks Back Over 25 Years of Science
As APS celebrates its 25th anniversary, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science is featuring a series of special sections that take a look at how the field has changed over the last 25 years.
The special section in the September issue includes articles that explore psychology as a multilevel science, advances in eyewitness science, the emergence of relationship science, and developments in the area of cognitive psychology.
25 Years Toward a Multilevel Science Marilynn B. Brewer
When the Association for Psychological Science (then the American Psychological Society) was founded 25 years ago, there was some debate as to whether the organization should seek to advance a narrowly focused view of the psychological sciences or take a broader and more integrated view. In the end, the organization chose to represent the discipline as a whole. The integrated view taken by APS in 1988 is reflected in the current state of…
Tags: Perspectives on Psychological Science | No Comments »
The Influence of Children’s Personalities on Interventions for Aggression
All children are aggressive at one time or another; however, a small group of children display pervasive and unremitting levels of aggression. Children who display high levels of aggression are at risk for a number of negative outcomes such as school failure, drug use, and delinquency. Interventions to reduce aggressive behavior are often instituted at a young age, as nipping this behavior in the bud can prevent children from developing persistent conduct problems later in life.
In the past decade, much research has been conducted on the effectiveness of interventions with children. These studies find that school-based interventions can be effective, but that the level of benefit seen often varies with children’s age, gender, or ethnicity. Studying factors that influence (or moderate) the effect of an…
Tags: Aggression, Child Development, Editor's Choice, International, Personality, Social Adjustment | 2 Comments »
Anxiety Limits Our Ability to Discriminate Faces and Speech
Anxiety can impair our accuracy on face- and word-recognition tasks, providing another possible source of fallibility in eyewitness testimony, according to research presented in two reports published in Psychological Science.
In the first report, participants were asked to breathe through a mask that provided normal air or a mask that provided CO2-enriched air, a reliable method of inducing anxiety.
The participants were then asked to discriminate between similar sounding phonemes, or letter sounds. For instance, though the /g/ and /k/ sounds are similar in “gift” and “kift,” people generally hear “gift” because it’s a familiar word. In this particular task, the researchers presented phonemes that spanned continuum from one sound to the other, so that some sounded much more like “gift” and some sounded much more like “kift.”
The participants who breathed normal…
Tags: Anxiety, Auditory Perception, Face Perception, Psychological Science, Visual Perception | No Comments »
