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Imitating Someone’s Accent Makes It Easier to Understand Them
In conversation, we often imitate each other’s speech style and may even change our accent to fit that of the person we're talking to. A recent study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that imitating someone who speaks with a regional or foreign accent may actually help you understand them better. "If people are talking to each other, they tend to sort of move their speech toward each other," says Patti Adank, of the University of Manchester, who cowrote the study with Peter Hagoort and Harold Bekkering from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. People don't only do this with speech, she says.
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Fear of Being Envied Makes People Behave Well Toward Others
It's nice to have success—but it can also make you worry that the jealous people will try to bring you down. New research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, has found that the fear of being the target of malicious envy makes people act more helpfully toward people who they think might be jealous of them. In previous research, Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University and his colleagues Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters had figured out that envy actually comes in two flavors: benign envy and malicious envy.
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Walter Mischel Wins 2011 Grawemeyer Award for Psychology
Good things come to those who wait. A scientist who showed that willpower can be learned—and that it carries lifelong benefits—has won the 2011 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. Walter Mischel, psychology professor and Niven professor of humane letters at Columbia University, will receive the $100,000 annual award. Taking the mystery out of the eternal challenge of resisting temptation, APS Fellow and former APS president Mischel created a scientific method to study human self-control, demonstrate its importance and explain the psychological processes that enable people to delay gratification.
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Social Support Is Most Effective When Provided Invisibly
New research by University of Minnesota psychologists shows how social support benefits are maximized when provided “invisibly”—that is without the support recipient being aware that they are receiving it. The study, “Getting in Under the Radar: A Dyadic View of Invisible Support,” is published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science. In the study, graduate student Maryhope Howland and professor Jeffry Simpson suggest there may be something unique about the emotional support behaviors that result in recipients being less aware of receiving support. “While previous research has frequently relied solely on the perceptions of support recipients, these findings are notable…
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Visions of sugarplums: The psychology of holiday temptation
Americans typically gain a pound between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. That may not sound like much to worry about, but the problem is that we don't lose that pound once the holiday season ends. Instead, we accumulate a pound per season, year after year, for 10, 15, 20 years and more. Looked at that way, it's no wonder that two-thirds of Americans are now obese. So all we have to do, rather than gaining that pound, is lose a pound during the holidays -- or just stay even. It's only six weeks, so let's show some discipline and skip the gravy, plum pudding and eggnog. It seems simple enough, but alas it's not, as any dieter will tell you.
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Motivation to End Racism Relies on ‘Yes We Can’ Approach
If you’re trying to end racism, it’s not enough to get people to understand that racism is still a problem. You also have to make them feel like they can do something about it, according to a study published in Psychological Science.
