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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Early Experience Affects the Strength of Vigilance for Threat in Rhesus Monkey Infants Tara M. Mandalaywala, Karen J. Parker, and Dario Maestripieri Research has suggested that the cognitive bias to threatening stimuli (i.e., attention toward and vigilance for threat) displayed by adult human and nonhuman primates may arise in part from early experiences. The researchers measured 3- and 9-month-old infant rhesus macaques' cognitive bias to threat by measuring their eye gaze in response to pictures of neutral and threatening macaque faces.
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Can’t Place That Smell? You Must Be American
The New York Times: FLORENCE, Italy — WE think of our senses as hard-wired gateways to the world. Many years ago the social psychologist Daryl J. Bem described the knowledge we gain from our senses as “zero-order beliefs,” so taken for granted that we do not even notice them as beliefs. The sky is blue. The fan hums. Ice is cold. That’s the nature of reality, and it seems peculiar that different people with their senses intact would experience it subjectively. Yet they do. In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific.
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Why Food Pilgrims Will Wait Four Hours For A Taste Of The Sublime
NPR: During a trip to Austin, Texas, last year, Sarah Grieco and her friends stood in line for two hours to taste the famously delicious smoked meat at La Barbecue. Before that, Grieco, 25, says she queued up for pork belly pancakes in Seattle, and ramen burgers in New York. And she and a friend waited three hours for the flashy cronut at Dominic Ansel Bakery. The food hasn't always lived up to the hype — she wasn't a fan of the ramen burgers. But, she says, she usually doesn't mind waiting to taste something truly unique. "I don't see it as time wasted," she says. "I see it as part of the experience." Dedicated — and exceedingly patient — food pilgrims like Grieco are everywhere.
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The Graying of Trauma: Revisiting Vietnam’s POWs
The Vietnam War was still raw in the collective American memory when the award-winning 1978 film The Deer Hunter brought home the horror of the POW experience. The film tells the story of three young men from Pennsylvania—Mike, Nick and Steven—who ship off as patriotic and gung-ho soldiers. They are captured during a firefight and endure physical deprivation and chilling psychological torture at the hands of the enemy. With the war’s end, they try to pick up the pieces of their lives, but all three are psychologically damaged. This is not surprising, given the ordeal they survived—the brutality, the threats, the intimidation and uncertainty.
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A Parrot Passes the Marshmallow Test
Slate: Can your kid pass the “marshmallow test”? And what does it mean if he can’t, but a parrot can? The marshmallow test is pretty simple: Give a child a treat, such as a marshmallow, and promise that if he doesn’t eat it right away, he’ll soon be rewarded with a second one. The experiment was devised by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s as a measure of self-control. When he later checked back in with kids he had tested as preschoolers, those who had been able to wait for the second treat appeared to be doing better in life. They tended to have fewer behavioral or drug-abuse problems, for example, than those who had given in to temptation.
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More than words: saying ‘thank you’ does make a difference
The Conversation: Most of us were taught that saying “thank you” is simply the polite thing to do. But recent research in social psychology suggests that saying “thank you” goes beyond good manners – it also serves to build and maintain social relationships. This premise has its base in the find-remind-and-bind theory of gratitude, proposed by US psychologist Sara Algoe, from the University of North Carolina.
