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‘Like’ it or not, teen brain is primed to join the crowd
The Washington Post: About the easiest action you can take in social media is to "like" a tweet or a photo. If you're a teenager, your brain is particularly primed to "like" what others have "liked," according to researchers from UCLA. Their new study, published in Psychological Science, is thought to be the first to replicate the social media experience while people are inside an fMRI scanner. The findings underscore the importance of both reward-seeking behavior and peer acceptance in adolescence. Thirty-four adolescents, ages 13-18, roughly equal numbers male and female, participated in the experiment.
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Could Thinking Positively About Aging Be The Secret Of Health?
NPR: The dictionary defines ageism as the "tendency to regard older persons as debilitated, unworthy of attention, or unsuitable for employment." But research indicates that ageism may not just be ill-informed or hurtful. It may also be a matter of life and death. Not that it's literally killing people. Researcher Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, says it depends on how much a given individual takes those negative ideas to heart. Read the whole story: NPR
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Genetic Variations Linked with Social and Economic Success
Psychological characteristics link genes with upward social mobility, according to data collected from almost 1000 individuals over four decades. The data suggest that various psychological factors play a role in linking a person’s genetic profile and several important life outcomes, including professional achievement, financial security, geographic mobility, and upward social mobility. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, led by psychological scientist Daniel W.
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Science Develops New Data- and Materials-Sharing Requirements
In June 2015, a committee sponsored by the Center for Open Science developed a set of guidelines offering “a concrete and actionable strategy toward improving research and publishing practices” named the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines. Now, scientific publishers are putting these guidelines into action: The journal Science has announced that it has used these guidelines to revise its standards for articles that it publishes. The TOP guidelines invite journal editors to consider transparency and openness as they pertain to eight different parts of the research process.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Searching for Category-Consistent Features: A Computational Approach to Understanding Visual Category Representation Chen-Ping Yu, Justin T. Maxfield, and Gregory J. Zelinsky Categories provide a fundamental structural framework that guides human cognition. When we encounter a single object, we typically understand that it belongs to a hierarchy of different categories that range from very specific (e.g., a sailboat) to very broad (e.g., mode of transportation). What visual features do people use to determine whether an object fits better into one category than another?
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Bower Reflects on Integrating Two Theoretical Frameworks
At the APS-Psychonomic Society W. K. & K. W. Estes Lecture at the 2016 APS Convention in Chicago, APS Past President and William James Fellow Gordon H. Bower delivered a 60-year retrospective on his attempts to integrate Clark Hull’s learning theory with William K. Estes’s statistical theory of learning. He also talked about his many years of collaboration with Estes, who passed away in 2011.