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Yes, love really IS blind! Rose-tinted glasses aren’t just for foolish romantics – they’re the key to lasting bliss, say scientists
Daily Mail: When my friend Emma invited me to meet her new boyfriend, Jerry, I was keen, but a bit intimidated. For weeks, she’d been going on about him. I knew all about his brilliant legal career, wit and, most of all, physique. As far as Emma was concerned, he was Brad Pitt with a brilliant brain. So when they walked in together, my jaw dropped — because he was so short that he barely came up to her waist. There is something irritating about the utter blindness of a man or woman in love. It takes a will of steel not to snigger as your friend rhapsodises about her Prince Charming who, to the eyes of the rest of the world, is all too clearly a frog.
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The Creative Workplace
The work day can often be somewhat predictable and routine, but Christina E. Shalley is attempting to enhance the creativity of employees. Shalleys research focuses on how a variety of social and contextual factors affect individuals and teams creativity. Her research combines psychology and management, using a variety of survey and experimental techniques. Specifically, she is investigating how to make jobs and work environments more conducive for creativity. Shalley has also studied group behavior and found that having a lot of personal ties and a diverse social network makes individuals more creative when they are working with others, increasing the teams overall creativity.
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Spoilers ‘do not ruin stories’, study says
BBC: Knowing how a book ends does not ruin its story and can actually enhance enjoyment, a study suggests. Researchers at the University of California San Diego gave participants 12 short stories where two versions were spoiled and a third unspoiled. In all but one story, readers said they preferred versions which had spoiling paragraphs written into it. Although the study could not explain why, it suggested the brain may find it easier to process a spoiled story. "You get this significant reverse-spoiler effect," study author and professor of social psychology Nicholas Christenfeld said.
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Uncovering the Embodiment of Communication
Gün R. Semin's general research interests center on language, social cognition and communication. He edited the book, Embodied Grounding, focuses on the emerging view that language and other cognitive processes must be understood in terms of the bodily states to which they are bound. This embodiment perspective focuses on the whole being not just one isolated information processing system and brings together research from neuroscience, cognitive science and social psychology.
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Learning and Memory
Henry L. “Roddy” Roediger, III has spent a career studying human learning and memory, particularly processes of memory retrieval. His recent research has focused on the power of retrieval as a mechanism for improving learning and retention and in applying this work to educational settings. His research has demonstrated that students retain more material when they retrieve it via tests than from restudying it, and Roediger and his collaborators are conducting field studies to determine whether their test-enhanced learning intervention is effective under actual classroom conditions. (It is). Roediger is also interested in illusions of memory.
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Mirror Neurons
Giacomo Rizzolatti has a longstanding interest in how the cognitive functions of the brain are connected to movement. When he and his colleagues were studying neurons that control hand and mouth actions in monkeys, they noticed that the neurons would not only activate when the animal picked up a piece of food, but the neurons would also switch on when the monkey saw a person pick up a piece of food. Many researchers believe that these neurons could be important for imitation, language acquisition, and various forms of perception.
