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How to function after a sleepless night
Men's Health: Every week a fresh tranche of research detailing the necessity of a solid eight hours sleep per night streams into the MH inbox. But at the end of the day (literally), getting your recommended quota of kip isn’t always possible. And sometimes, for reasons fun or foul, you can pass the whole night without a wink. So, when you need to be productive, but feel like a particularly decrepit zombie, what can you do to fire up your synapses and wring the best from your exhausted body? We have a remedy for every consequence of your stare-off with the sandman… Read the whole story: Men's Health
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Lisa DeBruine
University of Aberdeen, UK http://facelab.org What does your research focus on? Interpreting a wide range of signals from the face is at the center of social interaction. My original focus of research was on human kin recognition and how people respond to facial resemblance. As predicted by biological theories of inclusive fitness and inbreeding, I find that people perceive computer-generated facial resemblance as “trustworthy, but not lust-worthy”.
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Joshua Correll
University of Chicago, USA http://home.uchicago.edu/~jcorrell/index.html What does your research focus on? Racial stereotypes are complex and multifaceted. Researchers have highlighted the diverse attributes that are associated with a variety of racial groups. But amid this variability, stereotypes of the “other” as dangerous seem to occupy a special role. In the United States, these stereotypes are frequently applied to Black people — particularly to Black men. The presentation of a Black male face on a computer screen prompts attentional and physiological reactions in roughly a tenth of a second, and can motivate defensively oriented behavior.
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Yana Weinstein
Washington University in St. Louis, USA http://yanaweinstein.com What does your research focus on? I have very broad interests, but most of my research converges on the misperceptions we hold with regards to our cognitive functions. Examples of this include: false memory – how is it that we can come to believe we saw something that didn’t happen?; evaluations of test performance – what factors can influence whether we are optimistic or pessimistic about our performance on a test?; and study time allocation – why don’t we allocate more study time to material that is more likely to be forgotten? What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you?
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Peter F. Titzmann
University of Jena, Germany www2.uni-jena.de/svw/devpsy/staff/peter_e.html What does your research focus on? The focus of my research is on the development of children and adolescents with a migration background and the interplay between normative development and migration-related adaptation. For example, we investigated specific acculturation-related hassles of adolescent immigrants in Israel and Germany that can add to the normative demands of adolescence. In two other studies we examined whether delinquency is predicted by the same or different factors among two groups, namely immigrant and native adolescents; we also compared the autonomy expectations of these two groups.
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To children (but not adults) a rose by any other name is still a rose
Two vital parts of mentally organizing the world are classification, or the understanding that similar things belong in the same category; and induction, an educated guess about a thing’s properties if it’s in a certain category. There are reasons to believe that language greatly assists adults in both kinds of tasks. But how do young children use language to make sense of the things around them? It’s a longstanding debate among psychologists. A new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the predominant answer.
