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The Price of Pain and the Value of Suffering
During these trying financial times, the cost of healthcare and how much we are willing to pay for it is at the top of our economic concerns. The financial value of pain has a wide ranging influence, affecting drug prices and injury compensation. But what about on an individual level — is it possible to place a value on our health, to prevent pain and suffering? University College London psychologists Ivo Vlaev and Nick Chater, and neuroscientists Ben Seymour and Raymond J. Dolan were interested in just how much money volunteers were willing to pay to avoid pain and discomfort.
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Eye Spy: Study Reveals We Seek New Targets During Visual Search, But Not During Other Visual Behaviors
When we look at a scene in front of us, we need to focus on the important items and be able to ignore distracting elements. Studies have suggested that inhibition of return (in which our attention is less likely to return to objects we’ve already viewed) helps make visual search more efficient – when searching a scene to find an object, we have a bias toward inspecting new regions of a scene, and we avoid looking for the object in already searched areas. Psychologists Michael D.
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Imagine This: Study Suggests Power of Imagination is More Than Just a Metaphor
We’ve heard it before: “Imagine yourself passing the exam or scoring a goal and it will happen.” We may roll our eyes and think that’s easier said than done, but in a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists Christopher Davoli and Richard Abrams from Washington University suggest that the imagination may be more effective than we think in helping us reach our goals. A group of students searched visual displays for specific letters (which were scattered among other letters serving as distractors) and identified them as quickly as possible by pressing a button.
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From Stress to Financial Mess: Study Suggests Acute Stress Affects Financial Decision Making
It is not surprising that as our economy continues its freefall, we are feeling increasingly more stressed and worried. Many of us are feeling extreme unease about the security of our jobs and being able to make our next mortgage payment. However, according to new a report in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, stress could make our financial troubles even worse. The study, conducted by psychologists Anthony J. Porcelli and Mauricio R. Delgado of Rutgers University, reveals that acute stress affects risk taking during financial decision making.
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Living in History: How Some Historical Events Shape Our Memory
If you are resident of New Orleans, how would you describe personal events that occurred shortly before August 2005? Would you refer to them as happening “back in July of 2005” or would you describe them as happening “just before Hurricane Katrina”? If you live in Oregon, would you make reference to Hurricane Katrina? A team of researchers, led by psychologist Norman R. Brown from the University of Alberta, investigated how public events (e.g., war, natural disaster, terrorism) shape our personal memories. The experiment was conducted in two parts and included participants from ten cities around the world.
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I Feel Like a Different Person: Study Suggests Link Between How We Feel, Our Culture, and How We Behave
Scientists have long been interested in the interplay of emotions and identity, and some have recently focused on cultural identity. One’s heritage would seem to be especially stable and impervious to change, simply because it’s been passed down generation after generation and is deeply ingrained in the collective psyche. But how deeply, exactly? Psychologists Claire Ashton-James of the University of British Columbia, William W. Maddux from INSEAD, Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, and Tanya Chartrand from Duke University decided to explore this intriguing question in the laboratory, to see if even something as potent as culture might be tied to normal mood swings.
