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Winning Streak, Really?
Peter Ayton studies our judgment and decision making processes, especially where those processes often go wrong. He has investigated judgment errors like the hot-hand fallacy, in which people tend to expect that recent positive successes within a random sequence will continue—like a basketball player on a “hot” shooting streak—and the related gambler’s fallacy, in which people expect that such a positive or negative streak will eventually be balanced out.
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Imaging study reveals differences in brain function for children with math anxiety
Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time how brain function differs in people who have math anxiety from those who don’t. A series of scans conducted while second- and third-grade students did addition and subtraction revealed that those who feel panicky about doing math had increased activity in brain regions associated with fear, which caused decreased activity in parts of the brain involved in problem-solving.
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Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Convention
The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Convention will be held November 15 - 18, 2012 in National Harbor, MD. For more information visit: http://www.abct.org/Members/?m=mMembers&fa=Convention
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49th Annual Meeting of the Animal Behavior Society
The 49th Annual Meeting of the Animal Behavior Society will be held June 10 - 14, 2012 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For more information visit: http://animalbehaviorsociety.org/absmeetings/
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Conflicting Moralities
The Wall Street Journal: The work of Jonathan Haidt often infuriates his fellow liberals. A professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, he has focused in recent years on trying to understand the range and variety of our moral intuitions, especially as they relate to the most polarizing issues of the day. What he sees across the dividing line of American politics is a battle of unequals: Republicans who "understand moral psychology" arrayed against Democrats who "don't." Mr. Haidt is not simply parroting the familiar charge that the party of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove is more adept at the dark arts of political manipulation.
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Context for Fla. shooting? Study finds holding gun makes you likely to think others have guns
The Washington Post: No one knows what led a Florida neighborhood watch captain to shoot Trayvon Martin, a teenager carrying no weapon. But a new study raises an intriguing question: Could the watch captain have been fooled into thinking the youth was armed in part because he himself was holding a gun? In the study, volunteers who held a toy gun and glimpsed fleeting images of people holding an object were biased toward thinking the object was a gun.
