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What’s in a Royal Name? Psychological Researchers Explain the Significance
The royal baby has been named — George Alexander Louis. And that handle will have a significant bearing on the child’s future, psychological researchers say.
As Jason Goldman of the University of Southern California describes in The Guardian, children born in European nations are more likely to have popular, traditional names than children born in countries colonized by European explorers. Those findings were reported in a 2011 study published in Psychological Science.
And it appears the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed this naming norm, in effect safeguarding the child’s future public image.
Albert Mehrabian, professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA, has extensively researched the science of names, finding that unconventional names tend to elicit negative reactions from others. And unconventional spellings of common names don’t do the child any…
Tags: Child Development, Naming, Parenting, Social Perception | No Comments »
Oxytocin May Reduce Anxiety Related to Social Threats, But Only for Some
Oxytocin — a hormone thought to promote trust and empathy — has been considered as a possible tool for the treatment of social anxiety. But new research suggests that the effects of oxytocin are nuanced, promoting prosocial behaviors only in people with low social anxiety.
This new study, conducted by Ellen de Bruijn of Leiden University and Sina Radke of Radboud University Nijmegen, examined whether administration of oxytocin might influence how people respond to happy, angry, or neutral faces.
In some trials, the participants were asked to pull on a joystick to make the face to move toward them on the screen — a proxy for social approach behavior. On other trials, participants were asked to avoid particular expressions by pushing away on the joystick.
By examining participants’ responses to all possible behavior-face pairings,…
Tags: Anxiety, Emotions, Social Psychology, Threat | No Comments »
Distracted at Dinner? That’s Why Your Cooking Tastes Bland
Almost half of our meals in Western society are consumed in front of a TV. We nosh on fast-food while driving, we snack constantly while working at the office — all in all, we’re paying less attention to our food these days. Now, new research suggests that in addition to making us eat more, distractions during meals may also make our food taste different.
In a new set of experiments published in Psychological Science, Lotte van Dillen of Leiden University and Reine van der Wal of Raboud University Nijmegen revealed that salty, sweet, and sour foods are perceived differently when we’re distracted by a memory task.
After memorizing a 1- or 7-digit number, participants consumed strong or weak concentrations of sour lemon juice, sweet grenadine syrup in water,…
Tags: Consumer, Perception, Psychological Science, Technology | No Comments »
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Perspectives on Psychological Science: Volume 8, Number 4Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, publishes an eclectic mix of provocative reports and articles, including broad integrative reviews, overviews of research programs, meta-analyses, theoretical statements, and book reviews. This new issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science includes a special section on advancing science.
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Trust, Punishment, and Cooperation Across 18 Societies: A Meta-Analysis Daniel Balliet and Paul A. M. Van Lange ________________________________________________________________________________________
Perceiving Minds and Gods: How Mind Perception Enables, Constrains, and Is Triggered by Belief in Gods Will M. Gervais ________________________________________________________________________________________
Taking Stock of Unrealistic Optimism James A. Shepperd, William M. P. Klein, Erika A. Waters, and Neil D. Weinstein
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Special Section on Advancing Science:Introduction Barbara A. Spellman ________________________________________________________________________________________
An Additional Future for Psychological Science…
Tags: APS Journals, Perspectives on Psychological Science | No Comments »
Hearing What We Read
Psychological scientists have discovered new evidence of what goes on in the brain when people read printed words. The scientists, led by Maria Dimitropoulou of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, in Donostia, Spain, used Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes, to investigate how knowledge about the relationship between written language and sound influences our ability to recognize words.
The study was published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. In two experiments, the scientists used the masked priming paradigm, a method used to study visual word recognition. The paradigm works like this: First, volunteers are briefly shown one string of letters, called the prime. The prime’s appearance and disappearance happen so fast that the volunteers aren’t even aware of seeing it. Immediately…
Tags: Cognitive Psychology, Foreign Language, Language, Reading, Visual Perception | No Comments »
