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Science Study: verbally acknowledging fear helps dissipate it
Wired: According to a study published by a team of psychologists, telling a spider you are frightened of its ugly and terrifying self is the path to setting yourself free from a fear of arachnids. Methods of modifying human behaviour when it comes to battling fear range from shaping that behaviour through positive reinforcement or acclimatising an individual to a feared object through systematic desensitisation. Regulating emotions through positive verbal reinforcement is also a popular practice -- for instance, encouraging those afraid of spiders to approach the arachnid in question while repeating the words "that spider can't hurt me and I'm not afraid of it".
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The Creativity of the Wandering Mind
Pacific Standard: Do you have a numbingly dull job, one so monotonous that you frequently find your mind wandering? Well, congratulations: without realizing it, you have boosted your creative potential. Mindless tasks that allow our thoughts to roam can be catalysts for innovation. That’s the conclusion of a research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s META Lab (which focuses on Memory, Emotion, Thought and Awareness). Their research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests putting a difficult problem in the back of your mind won’t, by itself, lead to creative thinking.
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Can You Train Business School Students To Be Ethical?
Slate: A few years ago, Israeli game theorist Ariel Rubinstein got the idea of examining how the tools of economic science affected the judgment and empathy of his undergraduate students at Tel Aviv University. He made each student the CEO of a struggling hypothetical company, and tasked them with deciding how many employees to lay off. Some students were given an algebraic equation that expressed profits as a function of the number of employees on the payroll. Others were given a table listing the number of employees in one column and corresponding profits in the other.
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Can You Learn While You’re Asleep?
NPR: If you're a student, you may have harbored the fantasy of learning lessons while you sleep. Who wouldn't want to stick on a pair of headphones, grab some shut-eye with a lesson about, say, Chinese history playing in his ears — and wake up with newly acquired knowledge of the Ming Dynasty? Sadly, it doesn't work. The history lesson either keeps you from going to sleep, or it doesn't — in which case you don't learn it. But researchers may have taken the first baby step to making the fantasy come true: In an unusual experiment published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers Anat Arzi, Ilana Hairston and others showed that people are capable of learning simple lessons while fast asleep.
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Do SAT Scores Help or Hurt in Decisions About Who Will Do Well in College?
Every year, nervous high school juniors and seniors, clutching #2 pencils and armed with hours of test preparation, sit down and take the SAT. At their most basic, these tests focus on verbal, math, and writing ability, and performance on these tests has been linked to subsequent academic performance. As a result, college admissions teams use SAT scores along with other information, such as high school grades, in choosing their incoming freshman classes. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the SAT has been the subject of much scrutiny.
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Personality Dynamics Through the Lens of Cognitive Science
With the goal of advancing a cognitive neuroscience of personality dynamics, leading researchers from the United States and Europe gathered in Trieste, Italy on July 10, 2012 to present cutting-edge findings on the neural and evolutionary bases of intrapersonal processes and structures. The event, sponsored by the Association for Psychological Science, featured Anna Abraham, Jennifer A. Bartz, Arnaud D’Argembeau, and Robert Cloninger, and was orchestrated by Daniel Cervone, chair of the symposium. In the beautiful framework of Trieste, the event preceded the opening of the 16th European Conference on Personality, which featured more than 500 participants from about 40 countries this year.
