-
Never Forget a Face? Women May Remember Faces Better Because They Scan More
Women may remember faces better than men in part because they spend more time studying features without even knowing it, suggests a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. According to the researchers, teaching people to increase feature scanning may be one way to help improve their memory for faces. The findings may help to shed light on long-standing questions about why some people can remember faces easily while others quickly forget the face of someone they’ve just met.
-
Microbleeding in Brain May Be Behind Senior Moments
Science: People may grow wiser with age, but they don't grow smarter. Many of our mental abilities decline after midlife, and now researchers say that they've fingered a culprit. A study presented here last week at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science points to microbleeding in the brain caused by stiffening arteries. The finding may lead to new therapies to combat senior moments. This isn't the first time that microbleeds have been suspected as a cause of cognitive decline. "We have known [about them] for some time thanks to neuroimaging studies," says Matthew Pase, a psychology Ph.D. student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
-
Emotional Regulation Strategies May Influence Anxiety, Study Finds
The Huffington Post: How you deal with both positive and negative emotions could have big implications for your mental health. Emotional regulation -- whether you avoid your emotions, or explore them -- may plat a role in how much, and whether, you suffer from anxiety, according to a new University of Illinois study. The findings, recently published in the journal Emotion, are based on survey responses from 179 healthy adult men and women. The participants answered questionnaires asking them how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations.
-
The Key to a High IQ? Not Getting Distracted
TIME: A new study suggests that intelligence is more about what the brain chooses to ignore than simply its ability to process information rapidly. The research, which was published in the journal Current Biology, suggests new ways of testing intelligence that may be less biased by cultural knowledge— as many have claimed other IQ tests are. It may also help to explain the profound intellectual talents of some autistic people. “It’s a really interesting potential new paradigm,” says Scott Barry Kaufman, adjunct assistant professor of psychology at New York University, who was not associated with the research.
-
Thought of Money Makes You Less Social, Study Suggests
LiveScience: Subtle reminders of money can affect the way people behave in social settings, causing them to be less engaged with others, suggests new research. A group of researchers discussed results from ongoing investigations into how money impacts social relationships here at the 25th annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) on Sunday (May 26). "Money holds lots of different associations for different people," said Kathleen Vohs, an associate professor of marketing in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who moderated an APS panel on the topic.
-
Bending the Curve on a Long War’s Mental Toll
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Washington — The annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science, held here over the Memorial Day weekend, presented plenty of worry for those concerned over the field’s recent, high-profile troubles with replication, data quality, and fraud. There was the half-day session on “Building a Better Psychological Science,” which featured several scientists who have raised alarms about the field in the past two years, including Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.
