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Upper-Class People Have Trouble Recognizing Others’ Emotions
Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn't mean they're more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others. The researchers were inspired by observing that, for lower-class people, success depends more on how much they can rely on other individuals.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Interpersonal Sensitivity, Status, and Stereotype Accuracy David A. Kenny, Amanda Snook, Eliane M. Boucher, and Jeffrey T. Hancock Previous studies have suggested that subordinates are more accurate in judging how their bosses view them than are bosses at judging how subordinates view them. Those studies also suggest that bosses are more accurate in judging how subordinates view themselves than are subordinates in judging how bosses view themselves.
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Dire Messages About Global Warming Can Backfire, Study Shows
Scientists and environmental advocates may have more success convincing people about the dangers of global warming if they communicate those risks in less apocalyptic ways, research suggests.
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Being Faced With Gender Stereotypes Makes Women Less Likely to Take Financial Risks
Research suggests that stereotypes about women and risk taking can influence how women actually make financial decisions.
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Your View of Personal Goals Can Affect Your Relationships
How you think about your goals—whether it's to improve yourself or to do better than others—can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People with "mastery goals" want to improve themselves. Maybe they want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe loop. On the other hand, people with what psychologists call "performance goals" are trying to outperform others—to get a better grade than a friend or be Employee of the Year.
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Sleep Makes Your Memories Stronger
As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Sleep is making memories stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who cowrote the review with Elizabeth A.