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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Power Anomalies in Testing Mediation David A. Kenny and Charles M. Judd In this article, the authors describe several peculiarities of mediation analysis in which the power for the test of the total effect and the power for the test of the direct effect can be dramatically different than the power for the test of the indirect effect. The authors describe when and why these peculiarities might occur and their implications for interpretation of mediation analyses. "Top-Down" Effects Where None Should Be Found: The El Greco Fallacy in Perception Research Chaz Firestone and Brian J.
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Alcohol Dampens Stress Responses, Especially for Uncertain Threats
Whether it's a glass of wine, a pint of beer, or a tumbler of whiskey, people often turn to alcohol to calm their nerves. Anecdotally, alcohol does seem to help dampen our stress response, but the specifics of how, when, and for whom this stress reduction actually occurs remains unclear. Researchers John Curtin, Daniel Bradford, and Benjamin Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to better understand the mechanisms and boundary conditions that contribute to the stress-dampening properties of alcohol. In particular, they wanted to explore how alcohol influences our responses to threats of varying certainty and severity.
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Studies show the long-term, positive effects of fitness on cognitive abilities
The Washington Post: It has long been accepted that exercise cuts the risk of heart disease, and recent studies suggest a raft of more general benefits, such as reducing the risk of certain types of cancer and even preventing the onset of Type 2 diabetes. Now it seems that gym junkies can also expect a boost in brainpower, too. This is not just the vague glow of well-being suggested by sayings such as “a sound mind lives in a healthy body.” John Ratey, a neoropsychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and others are finding that fitness has a long-term influence on a wide range of cognitive abilities.
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Eyes are better at mental snapshots than cameras, study suggests
CNN: I've got hundreds of photos from my recent Europe trip, split between a smartphone and a big camera. A lot are shots of the same thing -- my attempt to get the perfect lighting on a fountain or a cathedral, for example -- so that I'll have these scenes to remember always. So I was interested to read a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggesting that the act of taking photos may actually diminish what we remember about objects being photographed. "People just pull out their cameras," says study author Linda Henkel, researcher in the department of psychology at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
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New Research: Rituals Make Us Value Things More
Harvard Business Review: Rituals in the workplace can reinforce the behaviors we want, create focus and a sense of belonging, and make change stick. I have gone on and on in the past about the benefits of established rituals and routines for personal productivity – how they capitalize on our brains’ ability to direct our behavior on autopilot, allowing us to reach our goals even when we are distracted or preoccupied with other things. And there are plenty of companies who’ve been smart enough to harness this power.
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This Test Can Determine If Your Marriage Will Last
TIME: The measure isn’t the high tech detector of romantic emotions that you might expect. Instead, it looks a lot like that familiar thing we know as our gut feeling. Next time somebody who just went through a messy breakup says that they always knew that the relationship would never work, it may not just be hindsight talking. In an intriguing new experiment on how much our automatic responses can tell us about what we really feel, a group of researchers discovered that there may be a test that predicts whether a marriage will last. First, they asked more than 100 recently married people in Tennessee to rate their spouse. Unsurprisingly, everybody declared that their spouses were swell.
