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How We Really Make Decisions
For centuries, philosophers, economists, and social scientists assumed that human beings are generally rational. Daniel Kahneman upended that assumption with findings that continue to reverberate through several scientific disciplines and have enormous implications for public policy. In his groundbreaking work with the late Amos Tversky, Kahneman, one of the most influential psychologists of our time, showed that when we face uncertain situations, we don’t examine the information in ways that are characterized as rational.
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Cracking the Speech Code
How exactly do we learn to speak? Patricia Kuhl has spent her career developing answers to that question. Kuhl is internationally recognized for her research on early language and brain development, and for her studies that show how young children learn. She is co-director, with her husband Andrew Meltzoff, of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. Kuhl’s lab investigates how infant and adult brains process speech. She has also conducted research on language development in autism.
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The Happiness Formula
Ed Diener has focused his career on uncovering the essential ingredients to subjective well-being, a term that includes positive feelings and life satisfaction. Nicknamed “Dr. Happiness,” Diener developed the Satisfaction with Life Scale and other measures of psychological well-being. In one noteworthy study, conducted with Martin E.P. Seligman, he found that students with the highest levels of happiness and fewest signs of depression had strong ties to friends and family. Another important finding is that there are some universals in what predicts happiness around the globe, such as trust and respect, but there are also some culture-specific causes as well.
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Summer Institute in Cultural Neuroscience
The fourth Summer Institute in Cultural Neuroscience will be held July 14–15, 2014, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Application deadline is March 15, 2014. For more information visit culturalneuroscience.isr.umich.edu/home.htm.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Shaping Attention With Reward: Effects of Reward on Space- and Object-Based Selection Sarah Shomstein and Jacoba Johnson The effect of rewards on conscious choice has been extensively researched, but the effect of reward on automatic processes is still not well understood. To investigate the effect of reward on automatic processes, the researchers investigated whether rewards would affect performance on a space- and object-based selective-attention task. The presence of a reward (money or points) altered participants' responses during the task.
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APA Division 1 Call for Nominations for Awards for Year 2014
Deadline: February 15, 2014 The Society for General Psychology, Division One of the American Psychological Association is conducting its Year 2014 awards competition, including the William James Book Award for a recent book that serves to integrate material across psychological subfields or to provide coherence to the diverse subject matter of psychology, the Ernest R. Hilgard Award for a Lifetime Career Contribution to General Psychology, the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology, and the Arthur W. Staats Lecture for Unifying Psychology, which is an American Psychological Foundation Award managed by the Society for General Psychology.
