Your source for the latest psychological research.
Donate to Help? Only if Nature Caused the Disaster
The world has had a tough couple of years with wars, hurricanes, oil spills, and floods. As you sit down to your morning paper, chances are high that you will come across a story about a devastating disaster. Maybe a tropical storm wiped out dams that protect crops, homes and livestock in a third-world county, and now the people living there are facing starvation. Donations are requested, but how likely are you to donate? What if the dams had failed not because the storm was particularly strong, but because corrupt officials had purposefully built substandard…
Tags: Charity, Editor's Choice, Emotions, Personality/Social, Victimization | No Comments »
Gün Semin Awarded High Dutch Honor
Gün Semin
On April 27, APS Secretary and Fellow Gün R. Semin was awarded the position of Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau. The Order of Orange-Nassau is a military and civil order of the Netherlands that is open to “everyone who has earned special merits for society” for the special way in which they have carried out their activities. It is comparable with the Order of the British Empire in the UK. The award was announced in this statement from Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
Semin, who is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (among other honors), studies communication, social cognition, and language as well as language…
Tags: Awards & Honors, Cognitive Psychology, Embodied Cognition, Language, Personality/Social, Social Cognition | No Comments »
Give Affect Science, Get Positive Emotion
Lauren Sears (left) and Molly Sanders-Cannon (right), research assistants in the ASI lab at Northeastern University.
A report from the 2012 Science & Engineering Festival
WASHINGTON — “Oh, I’m so glad that we found you!” one mother exclaimed as she and her young daughter approached the Affective Science Institute’s booth at last weekend’s U.S. Science and Engineering Festival on the National Mall.
I started to tell her that one basic ingredient of emotion is called affect. While terms like…
Tags: Developmental Psychology, Emotional Control, Emotions, Personality/Social, Students | No Comments »
Four APS Fellows Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
Yesterday, the National Academy of Sciences announced the election of 84 new members and 21 new foreign associates. APS Fellow Uta Frith, University College, London, UK and University of Aarhus, Denmark, was honored as a foreign associate. Among the new members were three APS Fellows: Randolph Blake, Vanderbilt University, Carol S. Dweck, Stanford University, and Susan A. Gelman, University of Michigan.
Randolph Blake is Centennnial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is best known for his work on vision, including his work on motion perception, perceptual organization, and visual cognition. Blake is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received the Earl Sutherland Prize as well as an IgNobel Prize for his research on ‘chilling’ sound.
Carol S. Dweck is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at the Stanford University.…
Tags: APS Fellows, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, General, Language, Visual Perception | No Comments »
This Is Your Mind on Music
Music is just sound – structured, organized sound. Yet it has surrounded us, moved us, and echoed in our memories throughout the history of our species.
Three of the world’s leading psychologists and neuroscientists in the study of music, and one of the world’s leading musicians, will discuss the psychological systems and “orchestra of brain regions” through which music enriches our lives at the Association for Psychological Science’s 24th annual meeting in Chicago, May 24-27, 2012.
Why Our Minds Groove to a Beat
Whether it’s reggaeton, house, salsa, or bluegrass, one thing is clear: people love moving to the beat of music. And growing evidence suggests that the ability to perceive beats and move in synchrony might be unique to humans and just a few other species because of a particular network in the brain. Drawing from his research on music and rhythm, Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in…
Tags: APS 24th Annual Convention (2012), Auditory Perception, Music | No Comments »
