-
Health Risk
Research has documented that Americans with more money and education have improved health prospects compared to poorer people. Nancy Adler has been a pioneer in investigating how social, psychological, and biological factors associated with socioeconomic status (SES) act together to determine the onset and progression of disease. Adler has investigated why individuals engage in health-damaging behaviors and how their understanding of risk affects their choices. This research has primarily been in reproductive health, examining adolescent decision making regarding contraception, conscious and preconscious motivation for pregnancy, and perceptions of risk of sexually transmitted diseases.
-
Careers and Leadership the Focus of New Psychological Science Blog
Countless professionals spend their workdays facing performance anxiety, low motivation, poor management, and burnout. Others have optimism, enthusiasm, and energy to reach substantial success. Psychological scientists have amassed decades’ worth of research on these traits and behaviors, and on what factors foster an optimal work environment. Now, APS has launched Minds for Business, a blog devoted exclusively to the study of work and leadership. Minds for Business will feature the latest research on leadership and management issues in the modern workplace.
-
The Perils of Being the Decider
Making business judgments, like forecasting the weather, always entails an element of uncertainty. Sound decision-making about when to spend capital – or, analogously, when to prepare for an incoming storm – requires assessing the degree of uncertainty and gauging whether the benefits outweigh the risks. Susan Joslyn, researcher at the University of Washington, studies how we make decisions when outcomes are unclear. In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Joslyn and co-author Jared LeClerc examine which factors lead to better (or worse) decision-making in uncertain situations.
-
Sensory Memory Can Improve Decision Making
Conventional wisdom holds that your memory of an experience is strongest right when it’s encoded – after all, if over a century of memory research has taught us anything, it’s that memory traces typically decay over time. But new research published in the September 2013 issue of Psychological Science suggests that a brief delay between seeing a stimulus and having to make a decision about that stimulus can improve the accuracy of our decision making, even if we don’t receive any new information about what the stimulus looked like in the meantime.
-
Turns Out Your Kids Really Did Love That Music You Played
NPR: Way back in the 1980s, were you the one playing "When Doves Cry" over and over? Well, don't be surprised if your kids wind up doing the same thing. Young adults have strong positive memories of the music their parents loved when they were the same age, a study finds. That flies in the face of the cultural stereotype that children reject their parents' taste in music. Participants in a study on musical memory didn't just say they remembered and loved the music that was popular in the early '80s, when their parents were young. They also loved the music of the '60s, which their grandparents may have been blasting while changing Mom's diapers.
-
A Spouse’s Voice Rings Loudest in a Crowded Room
ABC News: You're at a crowded party, and two voices are competing for your attention: one from your spouse, the other from a stranger. Who are you most likely to hear? Your spouse, according to new research. So which voice are you most likely to ignore? Your spouse, but that depends on how long you have been married. If you are middle-aged, your spouse's voice is easier to hear, and easier to ignore. But the ability to ignore declines with age. That seemingly odd finding makes sense to Canadian researchers at Queen's University who put 23 married couples, ages 44 to 79, through 600 trials to explore how familiarity affects the human auditory system.
