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What’s Location Got to Do With It?
When we see airplanes and toothbrushes and other visible things, we see them in relation to other objects — on top of a runway or inside of a mug on the bathroom counter. Many psychologists believe that location plays a special role in feature binding, the process through which the brain turns visual information about distinct features (e.g., location, color, and shape) into a cohesive image that represents an object. But a 2011 study published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology by Snehlata Jaswal of the Indian Institute of Technology in Ropar, India, and Robert H.
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Political Motivations May Have Evolutionary Links to Physical Strength
Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The principal investigators of the research -- psychological scientists Michael Bang Petersen of Aarhus University, Denmark and Daniel Sznycer of University of California, Santa Barbara -- believe that the link may reflect psychological traits that evolved in response to our early ancestral environments and continue to influence behavior today. “While many think of politics as a modern phenomenon, it has -- in a sense -- always been with our species,” says Petersen.
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Cross-cultural Personality and Gender Equality
Fanny Cheung's research underscores the importance of cultural context in assessing personality: much of her early work has involved translating, adapting, and refining one of the most widely used personality assessments, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), for the Chinese population. While the MMPI has been found to be generally valid across cultures, there has been a push in some Eastern Asian countries for indigenous assessments, which are designed to incorporate personality constructs that are more culturally relevant to the local people than some of those found in the imported western measures.
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APS Journal Seeks Labs to Participate in First Registered Replication Report Project
Updated June 5, 2013: Perspectives on Psychological Science has received a wonderful response to the call for proposals to participate in its first Registered Replication Report Project. The deadline for proposals to participate in the project based on Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) is Tuesday, June 11, 2013. We expect to announce additional projects this summer. Just two months after APS launched a new initiative aimed at promoting and publishing replication studies, the first protocol has been finalized and editors are accepting proposals from researchers who would like to contribute an independent replication to the project.
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A Good Meal: The Science of Savoring
The Huffington Post: There's nothing I like more than sharing a good meal with friends and family. I like everything about it -- the shopping for fresh ingredients, the chopping and cooking, and most of all, the mindful savoring and good conversation at the table. If I have time. Which I don't many days, and I confess that on those days, dinner is often as not a salad or sandwich on my lap, as I watch NCIS reruns. I know this is a bad habit, but it's just easier not to fuss. A lot of people are opting out of traditional meals in this way. Indeed, one study says that more than half of Americans' meals are now eaten in a room with the TV on.
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When Helping Hurts
The New York Times: AMERICAN parents are more involved in our children’s lives than ever: we schedule play dates, assist with homework and even choose college courses. We know that all of this assistance has costs — depleted bank balances, constricted social lives — but we endure them happily, believing we are doing what is best for our children. What if, however, the costs included harming our children? That unsettling possibility is suggested by a paper published in February in the American Sociological Review. The study, led by the sociologist Laura T.
