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New Research From Psychological Science
Do 18-Month-Olds Really Attribute Mental States to Others? A Critical Test Atsushi Senju, Victoria Southgate, Charlotte Snape, Mark Leonard, and Gergely Csibra Studies have suggested that infants can attribute beliefs to other people. In an independent test of this hypothesis, infants were blindfolded with an opaque blindfold (opaque condition) or a transparent blindfold that appeared opaque (trick condition). Then both groups watched a video of an actor wearing a blindfold while a puppet (the white bear) removed a toy from a box.
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Will Psych Majors Make the Big Bucks?
A new crop of college graduates have just landed on the job market. Right now they’re probably just hoping to get any job, if at all. However, for psychology majors, the salary outlook in both the short and long term is particularly poor, according to a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. It’s generally known that psychology majors don’t make a ton of money when they’re starting out; they’re not like engineering students, many of whom go straight into a job that pays well for their technical skills.
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Stop On Red! The Effects of Color May Lie Deep in Evolution…
Almost universally, red means stop. Red means danger. Red means hot. And analyzing the results in the 2004 Olympics, researchers have found that red also means dominance. Athletes wearing red prevailed more often than those wearing blue, especially in hand-to-hand sports like wrestling. Why? Is it random? Is it cultural? Or does it have evolutionary roots? A new study of male rhesus macaques strongly suggests it’s evolution. “The similarity of our results with those in humans suggests that avoiding red or acting submissively in its presence may stem from an inherited psychological predisposition,” says Dartmouth College neuroscientist Jerald D.
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Be It Numbers or Words – The Structure of Our Language Remains the Same
It is one of the wonders of language: We cannot possibly anticipate or memorize every potential word, phrase, or sentence. Yet we have no trouble constructing and understanding myriads of novel utterances every day. How do we do it? Linguists say we naturally and unconsciously employ abstract rules—syntax. How abstract is language? What is the nature of these abstract representations? And do the same rules travel among realms of cognition? A new study exploring these questions—by psychologists Christoph Scheepers, Catherine J.
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Attention and Awareness Aren’t The Same
Paying attention to something and being aware of it seem like the same thing -they both involve somehow knowing the thing is there. However, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that these are actually separate; your brain can pay attention to something without you being aware that it’s there. “We wanted to ask, can things attract your attention even when you don’t see them at all?” says Po-Jang Hsieh, of Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore and MIT. He co-wrote the study with Jaron T. Colas and Nancy Kanwisher of MIT.
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Depression and Negative Thoughts
We all have our ups and downs—a fight with a friend, a divorce, the loss of a parent. But most of us get over it. Only some go on to develop major depression. Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests part of the reason may be that people with depression get stuck on bad thoughts because they’re unable to turn their attention away. People who don’t recover from negative events seem to keep going over their troubles. “They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again,” says Jutta Joormann, of the University of Miami.