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Marc Berman
University of South Carolina Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, Canada www.psych.sc.edu/faculty/Marc_Berman or www.huffingtonpost.ca/marc-berman/ What does your research focus on? I focus on understanding the interaction between individual psychological processing and environmental factors that give rise to human behavior. My research has two main lines. In one line of research I study how external environments, such as the physical environment and social environment, affect human behavior.
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Mindfulness Helps Us Understand Our True Personalities, Study Says
The Huffington Post: It's easy to have blind spots when examining our own selves and personalities. After all, it's incredibly difficult to judge ourselves in an objective manner. But a new study suggests the best way to really get to know ourselves -- without help from rose-colored glasses -- is through mindfulness. The study, published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, shows just how mindfulness can help us really know ourselves, without the negative or positive bias. This is important because "blind spots" in knowing ourselves can spell trouble.
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Andy Baron
University of British Columbia http://childdevelopment.psych.ubc.ca What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the development of intergroup cognition from infancy through adolescence. In particular, I examine the development of intergroup attitudes and stereotypes across implicit and explicit levels of analysis. My work also examines how children’s conceptual representations of group membership (as an ingroup or an outgroup member) develop across these years and how such representations constrain a variety of psychological processes including categorization, induction, evaluation, memory, and perception.
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Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks
The New York Times: BAD NEWS SELLS. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news. Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, sick children, murdered spouses — the more suffering and mayhem, the more coverage. But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules.
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People perceive future events closer than past
Business Standard: People perceive events in the future as closer than those in the past, as it helps them to approach, avoid or otherwise cope with the events they encounter, a new study has found. Researchers suggest that the illusions that influence how we perceive movement through space also influence our perception of time. The findings provide evidence that our experiences of space and time have even more in common than previously thought.
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What Our Memories Tell Us About Ourselves
TIME: Do you remember the time President Obama shook hands with Iranian president Ahmadinejad? If you took part in a recent psychological study, it’s possible that you will. More than 5,000 participants were presented with doctored photographs representing fabricated political events, with around half claiming to have memories for the false scenarios (Obama has, of course, never shaken hands with the Iranian president). Part of a decades-long program of research by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, the latest study provides a neat demonstration of how our memories are created in the present rather than being faithful records of the past.
