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Q&A With Morton Ann Gernsbacher
APS Past President Morton Ann Gernsbacher is a Vilas Research Professor and the Sir Frederic C. Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gernsbacher is a leader in the field of cognitive psychology. Her research focuses on the cognitive roots of language comprehension. For more information about Gernsbacher and her research, visit www.GernsbacherLab.org. The DSM-5 officially comes out in May. Do you have any insights about what’s going to happen with diagnoses for conditions like autism? This is an important question, and one that many researchers, clinicians, and persons currently with and without diagnoses, are speculating about.
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For Innovation, Dodge the Prefrontal Police
The Wall Street Journal: Quick—what can you do with Kleenex? Easy, blow your nose. But what can you do with Kleenex that no one has ever done before? That's not so easy. Finally a bright idea pops up out of the blue—you could draw a face on it, put a string around the top and make it into a cute little Halloween ghost! Why is thinking outside of the Kleenex box so hard? A study published in February suggests that our much-lauded prefrontal brain mechanisms for control and focus may actually make it more difficult to think innovatively. ... But it's important to remember that correlation is not causation.
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Learning Strategies Outperform IQ in Predicting Achievement
Scientific American: In the 1960s, the legendary psychologist Albert Bandura rejected the view that learning is passive. Instead he emphasized the importance of the active use of learning strategies. Today, Bandura’s legacy lives on, and has been extended in exciting new directions.
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Sweating small stuff adds up: Bad reactions to daily stress raise risk of anxiety, other mental disorders: study
National Post: Getting stressed out about seemingly minor events in our daily lives may have long-term implications for mental health, a new study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, says. And negative emotions, like a poor diet and lack of exercise, can contribute to the development of mental health problems later in life. Psychologist Susan Charles and her colleagues, writing in the March 26 issue of the journal Psychological Science, used data collected from two U.S. national surveys to examine 711 people between the ages of 25 and 74.
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Conservatism and Product Purchase
The Huffington Post: When you meet new people, there are a few things you can find out about them that seem to say a lot about them. The music people listen to, for example, seems to say a lot about their outlook on life. Political affiliation is another big dimension. In the US, knowing that someone is a Democrat or a Republication seems to tell you a lot about who they are. Do people's politics really say that much about who they are, though? Certainly, political affiliation is related to people's beliefs about social issues and the role of government in people's lives. But, does political affiliation predict other aspect of people's behavior?
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Our Futures Look Bright – Because We Reject the Possibility That Bad Things Will Happen
People believe they’ll be happy in the future, even when they imagine the many bad things that could happen, because they discount the possibility that those bad things will actually occur, scientists have found.
