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Can’t Help Myself
The New York Times: Human consciousness, that wonderful ability to reflect, ponder and choose, is our greatest evolutionary achievement. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and fortunately we also have the ability to operate on automatic pilot, performing complex behaviors without any conscious thought at all. One way this happens is with lots of practice. Tasks that seem impossibly complex at first, like learning how to play the guitar, speak a foreign language or operate a new DVD player, become second nature after we perform those actions many times (well, maybe not the DVD player).
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Agreement of Alcohol Use Among Roommates
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Grace Jackson from New York University present her poster session research on “Agreement of Alcohol Use: A Year-Long Study of College Roommates.” Grace Jackson is interested in researching how relationships progress over time. Jackson and coauthors Sean P. Lane (New York University), Gertraud Stadler (Columbia University),Niall Bolger (Columbia University), andPatrick E. Shrout (New York University) studied 293 pairs of undergraduate roommates (N = 586). They found that roommates are generally pretty good at reporting trait-level, a.k.a.
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Suppressing Feelings of Compassion Makes People Feel Less Moral
It’s normal to not always act on your sense of compassion—for example, by walking past a beggar on the street without giving them any money. Maybe you want to save your money or avoid engaging with a homeless person. But even if suppressing compassion avoids these costs, it may carry a personal cost of its own, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. After people suppress compassionate feelings, an experiment shows, they lose a bit of their commitment to morality. Normally, people assume that ignoring their compassionate feeling doesn’t have any cost—that you can just suppress your sympathy and walk on.
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In the Mood for Some Pi(e)?
Thanks to computer-driven calculations, we know the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter goes on past one trillion digits. But since the 18th century, we’ve just called this behemoth number, Pi (π). And since 1988, people have been celebrating Pi Day on March 14th (3/14). Daily Observations has a few suggestions for celebrating Pi Day the psychological-science way: Don’t use your high school geometry skills very often? They might be helping you out anyway. A new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests that “numeracy” — like literacy, but for numbers instead of letters — actually helps you make more informed decisions.
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Personality Can Change Over Time, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post: According to a new study, grouches don't necessarily remain grouches for the rest of their lives. Findings published in the journal Social Indicators Research suggest that people's personalities can change over time just as much as external factors like change in jobs or income, or marriage or divorce. The researchers, of the University of Manchester's School of Psychological Sciences, said that the findings indicate we can increase our well-being not just through these actual external changes, but also through changes in our personalities.
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Partnersuche: Amor ist online
ORF: Onlinedatings werden immer beliebter. Mittlerweile lernen knapp 25 Prozent aller US-Amerikaner ihre Partner über das Internet kennen, wie eine Überblicksstudie zeigt. In Europa verläuft der Trend ähnlich. "Onlinedating hat den Mainstream erreicht. Und es verliert zusehends das soziale Stigma, mit dem es einst versehen war", schreiben Forscher um Harry Reis im Fachblatt "Psychological Science in the Public Interest". Der Psychologe von der University of Rochester hat mit seinen Kollegen mehr als 400 einschlägige Studien ausgewertet, sie zeichnen ein Bild des gesellschaftlichen Umbruchs. Read the whole story: ORF See Harry Reis at the 24th APS Annual Convention
