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Mood and Experience: Life Comes At You
Living through weddings or divorces, job losses and children’s triumphs, we sometimes feel better and sometimes feel worse. But, psychologists observe, we tend to drift back to a “set point”—a stable resting point, or baseline, in the mind’s level of contentment or unease. Research has shown that the set points for depression and anxiety are particularly stable over time. Why? “The overwhelming view within psychiatry and psychology is that is due to genetic factors,” says Virginia Commonwealth University psychiatrist Kenneth S. Kendler.
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FDA’s Graphic Cigarette Images: Will They Work?
Can graphic images persuade people to make lasting changes to their behavior? The answer, according to psychological research, is probably not. Howard Leventhal, the Board of Governors Professor of Health Psychology at Rutgers, agrees that photos are in fact stronger than words, but that images may not lead to long-term behavioral effects. Leventhal states, “You don’t need a lot of threat to get something to happen as long as the threat is associated with a clear, simple plan of action.
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Powerful, Intoxicated, Anonymous: The Paradox of the Disinhibited
A team of scientists proposes a model to explain how the diverse domains of power, alcohol intoxication and anonymity produce similarly paradoxical social behaviors.
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How Do We Recognize Faces?
How do we recognize a face? Do we pick out “local” features— an eye or a mouth— and extrapolate from there? Or do we take in the “global” configuration—facial structure, distance between the features—at once? Now, a group of psychologists— Sébastien Miellet and Philippe G. Schyns at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Roberto Caldara at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland—have settled the longstanding debate between scientists who hold to the “local” strategy and those who favor the “global” one. “Face processing does not rely on a rigid system or a unique and mandatory information sampling strategy,” said Miellet.
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What Do We Pay Attention To?
Once we learn the relationship between a cue and its consequences—say, the sound of a bell and the appearance of the white ice cream truck bearing our favorite chocolate cone—do we turn our attention to that bell whenever we hear it? Or do we tuck the information away and marshal our resources to learning other, novel cues—a recorded jingle, or a blue truck? Psychologists observing “attentional allocation” now agree that the answer is both, and they have arrived at two principles to describe the phenomena. The “predictive” principle says we search for meaningful—important—cues amid the “noise” of our environments.
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The Myth of the ‘Queen Bee’: Work and Sexism
Researchers wondered if the “queen bee” behavior—refusing to help other women and denying that gender discrimination is a problem, for example—might be a response to a difficult, male-dominated environment.