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Does a “Triple Package” of Traits Predict Success?
What makes one person more successful than another? For decades, social scientists have been trying to identify the factors that lead some people, but not others, to land dream jobs in high-paying, prestigious careers. While there’s certainly no set formula for becoming a success, researchers have identified several social factors that can certainly help your chances. Educational attainment, general intelligence, and the Big-Five personality trait of conscientiousness have all been shown to consistently predict job performance, income, wealth accumulation, and status attainment. But what about other social factors?
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Seeing Isn’t Required to Gesture Like a Native Speaker
People the world over gesture when they talk, and they tend to gesture in certain ways depending on the language they speak. Findings from a new study including blind and sighted participants suggest that these gestural variations do not emerge from watching other speakers make the gestures, but from learning the language itself. “Adult speakers who are blind from birth also gesture when they talk, and these gestures resemble the gestures of sighted adults speaking the same language.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: To Live Among Like-Minded Others: Exploring the Links Between Person-City Personality Fit and Self-Esteem Wiebke Bleidorn, Felix Schönbrodt, Jochen E. Gebauer, Peter J. Rentfrow, Jeff Potter, and Samuel D. Gosling Does it matter if your personality meshes with the personality of the city in which you live? More than 500,000 participants from 860 cities across the United States were assessed for their Big Five personality traits, religiosity, and self-esteem. City-level personality was calculated from the personality scores for each trait within each city.
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Cognition at the Speed of (LED) Lights
Since the 1970s, overhead fluorescent lighting has been standard in most office buildings. But, organizations may want to start swapping out their fluorescent lights for newer LED technology. Not only do LEDs use less power and last longer than conventional fluorescent lighting – new research suggests they hold benefits for mood and cognition. Breanne Hawes and colleagues from the Cognitive Science Team at the United States Army Natick Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center and Tufts University compared the effects of different types of light on mood, perception, and cognition in military personnel.
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Do Medical Dramas Inhibit Reckless Driving?
Research on “risk-glorifying media exposure” has shown that movies like The Fast and the Furious can encourage risk-taking behavior, especially for teenagers. But can certain media reduce risky adolescent driving? In a new article, social scientist Kathleen Beullens (Leuven School for Mass Communication Research, Belgium) and psychological scientist Nancy Rhodes (The Ohio State University) discuss cultivation theory and how television can build a new reality in adolescents’ minds — one in which they may feel more or less comfortable taking risks.
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There’s a Better Way to Brainstorm
The team brainstorming session is a common way for drumming up new ideas but research suggests that they have one big problem: Group interactions, like brainstorming, can actually inhibit idea generation. APS Fellow Paul B. Paulus of the University of Texas at Arlington has studied creativity in groups, and his research suggests that brainstorming doesn’t actually work as well as people might think. “In face-to-face settings, the opportunity to fully share information and knowledge is limited by the fact that only one person can express his or her ideas at one time,” Paulus and colleagues write in a recent study.
