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Car Talk: Contentious Conversations Drive Distraction
Engaging in a heated, emotional discussion with a passenger can turn into a dangerous distraction for drivers.
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People Love Working with Extraverts, Until the Going Gets Tough
The same qualities that led to an “extravert advantage” when teams functioned smoothly led to exacerbated tensions when teammates faced conflicts.
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Higher Status People Are Meaner Drivers
Frustrated drivers are more likely to lash out aggressively at vehicles they perceive as having a lower social status.
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Scientists Explore How Nutrition May Feed Mental Health
A special section in Clinical Psychological Science highlights the different approaches that psychology researchers are taking to understand the many ways in which nutrition and mental health intersect.
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Studying Perception of Animate Versus Inanimate Objects With LEGO Blocks
Animate objects, such as animals and humans, hold a special sway over humans’ attention. For example, when presented with two scenes (one containing an animal and one not), people will preferentially orient to the one containing the animal. People are also faster and more accurate at detecting change in animate objects compared with inanimate objects The privileged attention of animate objects compared with inanimate objects makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint, as it has historically been — and continues to be — important to quickly determine if one is seeing a friend or foe, a predator or prey. In a 2016 study, Mitchell R. P.
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RAND Summer Institute Announces Two Conferences on Aging
RAND announces its two annual RAND Summer Institute conferences that address issues facing our aging population: The Mini-Medical School for Social Scientists on July 10–11, and the Demography, Economics, Psychology, and Epidemiology of Aging conference on July 12–13, 2017. The conferences will convene at the RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, California and are sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Behavioral and Social Scientists Research. Qualified Institute applicants must hold a PhD or have completed two years of a PhD program and be actively working on a dissertation.
