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The Myth of the ‘Queen Bee’: Work and Sexism
Researchers wondered if the “queen bee” behavior—refusing to help other women and denying that gender discrimination is a problem, for example—might be a response to a difficult, male-dominated environment.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Telling Things Apart: The Distance Between Response Keys Influences Categorization Times Daniël Lakens, Iris K. Schneider, Nils B. Jostmann, and Thomas W. Schubert Making gestures can help people organize their thoughts. To test whether space (e.g., the distance between two response keys) would affect how people categorized stimuli, researchers asked volunteers to perform a task in which they pressed one of two response keys to indicate the color of a word. If the keys were far apart, they responded faster on the incongruent trials in which the word did not match the color (e.g., the word “blue” printed in red ink).
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Can Aptitude Tests Really Predict Your Performance?
Colleges, employers, and the military all use aptitude tests to predict how well someone might do. In recent years, some critics of these tests have said there isn’t much difference in performance above a certain level—that, above a certain threshold, everyone is more or less the same. Now, in a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the authors find that this isn’t true. Instead, the higher your score, the better you perform later. But some critics have said that the tests aren’t much use at the top end of the scale.
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Imagination Can Influence Perception
Imagining something with our mind’s eye is a task we engage in frequently, whether we’re daydreaming, conjuring up the face of a childhood friend, or trying to figure out exactly where we might have parked the car. But how can we tell whether our own mental images are accurate or vivid when we have no direct comparison? That is, how do we come to know and judge the contents of our own minds? Mental imagery is typically thought to be a private phenomenon, which makes it difficult to test people’s metacognition of – or knowledge about –their own mental imagery.
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Testing Improves Memory
“We’ve known for over 100 years that testing is good for memory,” says Kent State University psychology graduate student Kalif Vaughn. Psychologists have proven in a myriad of experiments that “retrieval practice”—correctly producing a studied item—increases the likelihood that you’ll get it right the next time. “But we didn’t know why.” In the past, many researchers have believed that testing is good for memory, but only for the exact thing you are trying to remember: so-called “target memory.” If you’re asked to recall the Lithuanian equivalent of an English word, say, you will get good at remembering the Lithuanian, but you won’t necessarily remember the English.
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Chinese-English Speakers Translate English into Chinese Automatically
Over half the world’s population speaks more than one language. But it’s not clear how these languages interact in the brain. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it. Like her research subjects, Taoli Zhang of the University of Nottingham is originally from China, but she lives in the UK and is fluent in English. She co wrote the new paper with her colleagues, Walter J.B. van Heuven and Kathy Conklin.