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Smile and the world smiles back. Can looking at faces lower aggression?
The Guardian: Before I started my PhD, I worked as a "research assistant". That's a fancy title for an academic dogsbody; well, it can be. I was lucky and had some great bosses in the five years I had that job, but sometimes it can involve menial tasks like data entry, or running experiments you think are a complete waste of time. One such experiment, that I was asked to run by my boss while we waited for ethics approval on another study, was published last week in the journal Psychological Science. Shows what I know!
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Mindfulness Could Improve College Students’ Testing Ability, Study Finds
The Huffington Post: As if the stress-relieving, healthifying effects of mindfulness weren't enough, a new study shows it could actually help students perform better on tests by boosting their memory and reading comprehension skills. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, shows that mindfulness training could help college students do better on the verbal reasoning part of the GRE (Graduate Record Examination, an admissions test commonly used for graduate school).
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Common DNA Markers Can Account for More Than Half of the Genetic Influence on Cognitive Abilities Robert Plomin, Claire M. A. Haworth, Emma L. Meaburn, Thomas S. Price, Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, and Oliver S. P. Davis Although past research has shown that cognitive ability is heritable, it has proved difficult for genome-wide association studies to identify the genetic variants that account for this heritability.
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Should you ditch online dating?
Prevention: First, the good news: Looking for love (or lust) online has finally shed its negative stigma, becoming the most common strategy for singles looking to meet someone new. Now the bad news: Dating sites’ so-called “matching algorithms” may actually make it harder to find Mr. Right, according to a study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. But does that mean you should swear off dating sites for good? Read the whole story: Prevention
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Like Humans, Chimpanzees Know What They Know
Metacognition -- the ability to think about thinking -- is a cognitive skill that we use every day in recognizing what we know, and what we don’t know. Though metacognition was once thought to be a skill unique to humans, a new study published in Psychological Science suggests that chimpanzees may share this ability. Psychological scientist Michael Beran of Georgia State University and colleagues tested metacognition in three language-trained chimpanzees. All three chimpanzees had been trained from an early age to use symbols to request and label objects, actions, locations, and individuals. And they could respond to requests by humans using those symbols.
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Darby Saxbe
University of Southern California http://dornsife.usc.edu/nestlab What does your research focus on? I am fascinated by how social interconnections, particularly within families, shape our bodies and brains. For example, are spouses’ cortisol levels coordinated? How do early family environments influence youths’ neural and physiological reactivity? Dreaming up lab acronyms may be the academic’s version of doodling your future spouse’s surname in your journal.
