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New Research From Psychological Science
A Spontaneous Self-Reference Effect in Memory: Why Some Birthdays Are Harder to Remember Than Others Selin Kesebir and Shigehiro Oishi People may have a better memory for birthdays that are closer to their own: Volunteers recalling their friends’ birthdays tended to remember birthdays that were closer to their own than birthdays that were farther away from their own birthday. In a separate experiment, after reading brief biographies of people they did not know, volunteers correctly remembered the birthdays of the people whose birthdays were closer to their own than birthdays that were more distant.
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Anger Makes People Want Things More
Anger is an interesting emotion for psychologists. On the one hand, it's negative, but then it also has some of the features of positive emotions. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers find that associating an object with anger actually makes people want the object—a kind of motivation that's normally associated with positive emotions. People usually think of anger as a negative emotion. You're not supposed to get angry. But anger also has some positive features. For example, it activates an area on the left side of the brain that is associated with many positive emotions.
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Not So Fast—Sex Differences in the Brain Are Overblown
People love to speculate about differences between the sexes, and neuroscience has brought a new technology to this pastime. Brain imaging studies are published at a great rate, and some report sex differences in brain structure or patterns of neural activity. But we should be skeptical about reports of brain differences between the sexes, writes psychological scientist Cordelia Fine in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Border Bias: Mapping Risk and Safety
I once lived within a short walking distance of a state line, and I had a friend who lived right on the avenue that was the dividing line. That meant she could be cutting her lawn while watching her neighbor cut his lawn in a different state. Living on a border loses its novelty after a while, but visitors always find it intriguing. They seem to expect the Berlin Wall or some other concrete demarcation of an abstract political division. This curiosity arises because of cognitive mapmaking, which is different from regular mapmaking. Cartographers measure and plot distances over land and water, but when we make a mental map, we rely on categories to help us keep things straight.
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Women’s Choices, Not Abilities, Keep Them Out of Math-Intensive Fields
The question of why women are so underrepresented in math-intensive fields is a controversial one. In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, set off a storm of controversy when he suggested it could be due partly to innate differences in ability; others have suggested discrimination or socialization is more to blame. Two psychological scientists have reviewed all of the evidence and concluded that the main factor is women's choices—both freely made, such as that they'd rather study biology than math, and constrained, such as the fact that the difficult first years as a professor coincide with the time when many women are having children.
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Health Checkup: Kids and Mental Health
About one in five children in the U.S. suffers from some sort of emotional or behavioral condition, according to a new study led by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Among adults with confirmed ills, 50% were diagnosed before the age of 14 and 75% before 24. The estimated annual price tag for the treatment and consequences of juvenile psychological disorders is $250 billion, with those whose conditions are not caught early contributing to that total for years. Read more
