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Putting Corporate Quotas to Work for Women
Men outnumber women in corporate leadership positions to such an extent that in the US that there are more top chief executives named John than there are women leading major companies. Across the world, women are underrepresented in leadership positions. One tactic to help break down barriers is for companies or governments to institute requirements or quotas designed to increase women’s representation in leadership positions. But do these well-intentioned tactics actually work?
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Learning With Amnesia
Actors are a group of people rife for research opportunities because their profession requires that they remember vast amounts of ever-changing information — and recite that information at a moment’s notice. In a recent study in the journal Cortex, researchers Michael Kopelman (Kings College London) and John Morton (University College London) used the unique experiences of an actor with amnesia to better understand learning in individuals affected by the syndrome. In the past 15 years, several studies have examined the impact of hippocampal and medial temporal damage on the learning of semantic information — information relating to general facts and meaning.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: A Safe Haven: Investigating Social-Support Figures as Prepared Safety Stimuli Erica A. Hornstein, Michael S. Fanselow, and Naomi I. Eisenberger Research has shown that fear learning occurs more readily with certain stimuli such as snakes and spiders, perhaps because these types of stimuli have historically threatened humans' survival. Although fear conditioning to these prepared fear stimuli has been examined, little research has studied their parallels -- prepared safety stimuli (i.e., stimuli that have historically benefited survival).
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Failure, Emotions, and Explaining It to Your Boss
We all make mistakes in the workplace at one point or another, but is there an optimal way to explain it to your supervisor? In a 2015 paper published by Europe’s Journal of Psychology, David and Hareli Shlomo and APS Fellow Ursula Hess investigated whether showing emotion (or the lack thereof) and whether admitting guilt, blaming someone else, or giving an ambiguous response after a service failure could impact the believability of an employee’s account and their chances of being fired or promoted. The researchers recruited business school alumni from the University of Haifa in Israel to participate in an online experiment.
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Playing Action Video Games Boosts Visual Motor Skill Underlying Driving
Playing action-based video games may boost players’ ability to coordinate incoming visual information with their motor control, a skill critical to many real-world behaviors including driving, new research shows. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our research shows that playing easily accessible action video games for as little as 5 hours can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” says researcher Li Li of New York University Shanghai, lead author on the study.
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There’s a Better Way to Manage Time Management
For many people, it feels as if we have more to do and less time to do it in than ever before: children need to be fed, bosses need you to stay late, and someone needs to get the car to the mechanic. Juggling all of our responsibilities can make it feel as though there just isn’t enough time in the day to accomplish everything. To wrangle our crunched calendars, we turn to “productivity hacks” and the newest time-saving apps, but new research suggests that maybe we would be better off spending some time managing our time management.
