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Play It Again And Again, Sam
NPR: A couple of years ago, music psychologist decided to make some alterations to the music of . Berio was one of the most famous classical composers of the 20th century, a man internationally recognized for the dramatic power of his compositions. But Margulis didn't worry much about disrupting Berio's finely crafted music. After loading his most famous piece into a computer editing program, she just randomly started cutting. ... And the power of repeated exposure isn't just limited to music. Research has shown that the mere exposure effect makes stockbrokers feel more warmly toward stocks they've seen before; it also works when looking at art or fashion or random geometric shapes.
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We complain about being ‘too busy’ — but secretly we like it
TODAY: We are SO slammed, SO crazed, SO swamped—just so, SO BUSY. Things we are now too busy for include but are not limited to: Any workout lasting longer than 20 minutes, non-speed-reading, making regular coffee in a regular coffee pot. We update our Facebook friends about our crazy skeds in real time, and routinely start emails with an apology about the delay in reply, using our busy-ness as an excuse. ... Inspired by Schulte’s book, Slate writer Hanna Rosin wrote a piece recently about “busy-bragging,” the irresistible urge to whine about your jam-packed schedule.
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Cognitive Style as Environmentally Sensitive Individual Differences in Cognition: A Modern Synthesis and Applications in Education, Business, and Management
Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) The idea that people differ in the way they acquire and process information is not a new one. As early as the 1950s, researchers were examining the idea that people had different cognitive styles -- individually different manners of cognitive processing and functioning. Although this area of research fell out of favor in mainstream psychology during the late 1970s, it continued to be of interest in applied fields such as education and business.
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Treatment Tracker
One of the biggest challenges psychotherapists face is deciding on the appropriate treatment for individual patients. Wolfgang Lutz is an internationally recognized researcher on psychotherapy, and is leading the field in collecting important data about treatment effectiveness and results. He has pioneered the concept of expected treatment response (ETR), which involves an individualized log of each patient’s progress in relation to their expected response to the therapy. His work is helping providers to deliver proven and individually tailored treatment plans and to pre-emptively spot patients at risk for treatment failure.
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Uncovering a New Angle on Mental Distance
Why does the second hour of a journey seem shorter than the first? According to research from University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) and the Rotman School of Management, the answer lies in how we’re physically oriented in space. In a series of six studies, Sam Maglio, an assistant professor in UTSC’s Department of Management, demonstrated that a person’s orientation -- the direction they are headed -- changed how they thought of an object or event. The research is forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Feeling close to or distant from something impacts our behavior and judgment,” says Maglio.
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The Origins of Violence
NPR Science Friday: We’ve heard that human violence is on the rise, that it’s on the wane, that it’s hard-wired, and that it’s learned. But what do we really know about where violence comes from and how to stop it? Psychologist Steven Pinker, anthropologist Richard Wrangham, and crime writer Harold Schechter discuss the origins of mankind’s most troubling characteristic. Read the whole story: NPR Science Friday
