-
Who’s in the Know? To a Preschooler, the Person Doing the Pointing
If you want a preschooler to get the point, point. That’s a lesson that can be drawn from a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. As part of their investigation of how small children know what other people know, the authors, Carolyn Palmquist and Vikram K. Jaswal of the University of Virginia, found they were able to mislead preschoolers with the simple introduction of a pointing gesture. “Children were willing to attribute knowledge to a person solely based on the gesture they used to convey the information,” says Palmquist.
-
In the Brain, Broken Hearts Hurt Like Broken Bones
TIME: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can hurt just as much. Indeed, according to converging evidence reported in a new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, physical and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain. Naomi Eisenberger, co-director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UCLA, published the first brain-imaging paper revealing the overlap in 2003. She had been studying participants’ reactions to being rejected by other players (actually just a computer opponent) in a video game.
-
Imagining The Future Of Psychotherapy
WBUR Public Radio: The talking cure has come a long way since Sigmund Freud had women lying on his couch and free-associating several times a week. Today, there are a wide variety of scientifically-supported interventions for a wide variety of problems. But a heated discussion among major players in the psychotherapy world suggests that the standard treatments of today aren’t likely to be the standard treatments of tomorrow. I’m a clinical psychologist myself, with one foot in the world of clinical practice and one foot in the world of academic research.
-
The Greater Your Fear, the Larger the Spider
LiveScience: Fear can distort our perceptions, psychological research indicates, and creepy-crawly spiders are no different. People who are afraid of spiders see the arachnids as bigger than they actually are, recent experiments have shown. Researchers asked people who had undergone therapy to address their fear of spiders to draw a line representing the length of a tarantula they had just encountered in a lab setting. "On average, the most fearful were drawing lines about 50 percent longer than the least fearful," said Michael Vasey, lead study researcher and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
-
Why attack ads? Because they work
Los Angeles Times: In poll after poll, Americans say they don't like negative campaigning. Yet in the final week of the Florida primary, more than 90% of the ads broadcast were attack ads. That's not likely to change in the run-up to Super Tuesday. So why do candidates rely so heavily on a kind of advertising voters say they abhor? Because it works. To understand why, you have to consider what we know about how emotions work — and the different ways our conscious and unconscious minds and brains process "negativity" during elections. In 2008, my colleague Joel Weinberger and I tested voters' conscious and unconscious responses to two ads.
-
For Those With Low Self-Esteem, Facebook Makes Things Worse
The Atlantic: Facebook can be a boon for the socially awkward, a place where they can express themselves openly and connect more easily with others than they do in everyday life. But research from the University of Waterloo suggests that people with low self-esteem may end up making life harder for themselves with their Facebook posts. This happens because of the high negativity of their posts. Most people don't take well to negativity. In day to day life, they offer feedback on this with their comments or their body language or by walking away. On Facebook, they rarely respond to negative posts. The negativity still adds to their dislike of the poster, but the poster never hears about it.
