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Forensic experts ‘biased towards side which pays them’
The Telegraph: Although forensic experts are meant to be completely impartial when giving an expert opinion to the jury, they tend to favour the side which employs them. A study found that while the experts believed they were being impartial, there was an "allegiance effect" which appeared to colour their judgements. Researchers from the University of Virginia recruited 118 forensic psychologists and psychiatrists to evaluate a batch of case files on sexually violent offenders, telling them the work was commissioned by either prosecution or defence lawyers.
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Diminishing Fear Vicariously By Watching Others
Watching someone safely interact with a supposedly harmful object can help to extinguish conditioned fear responses, and prevent them from resurfacing.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Interactive Effect of Anger and Disgust on Moral Outrage and Judgments Jessica M. Salerno and Liana C. Peter-Hagene Although most people are familiar with the feeling of moral outrage, its emotional components are still unclear. The authors hypothesized that moral outrage is actually composed of a combination of anger and disgust. In the first of two studies, participants read vignettes about moral transgressions and then rated their levels of anger, disgust, and moral outrage in response to the stories. Supporting the authors' hypothesis, a combination of anger and disgust predicted moral outrage.
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Soup Kitchen Psychology: Nourishment For Impoverished Thinking
The Huffington Post: Poverty is emotionally crushing, and stigma only adds to that burden. The poor are often disparaged as lazy and incompetent -- unable or unwilling to improve their own lot. Why don't they go to school, eat more sensibly, and spend their money more wisely? In short, why don't they make better decisions for themselves? ... A team of psychological scientists may offer some hope. Crystal Hall of the University of Washington, and her colleagues Jiaying Zhao of the University of British Columbia and Eldar Shafir of Princeton, have been exploring ways to lessen the mental toll of poverty, and their work suggests that self-affirmation may be a useful tool.
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Whither the Type A personality?
I first studied psychological science in the 1970s, and one of the most popular ideas at that time was the Type A personality. Two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, had made the case that a certain type of person—competitive, driven, hurried, easily angered—had a much higher risk of heart attack and heart disease than did easy-going types, which they labeled Type B. The idea of Type A personality took hold in the public imagination, and it’s still heard in the common parlance today. The concept was scientifically controversial from the start, but it did provoke a lot of debate—and an explosion of research.
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Research Suggests That Being a Fan of a Bad NFL Team Is Making You Fat
Sports Illustrated: As if wearing an adult-sized replica jersey, yelling at the TV, and paying extortionary sums for personal seat licenses weren’t evidence enough, science has come along and confirmed what everyone already knew: Football makes fans do stupid things. Or, as it were, eat stupid things. This is according to professor Pierre Chandon and PhD candidate Yann Cornil of INSEAD Business School, who recently published a study in Psychological Science detailing how losses drive disconsolate fans into the arms of saturated fats.
