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Brain atrophy in elderly leads to unintended racism, depression, and problem gambling
As we age, our brains slowly shrink in volume and weight. This includes significant atrophy within the frontal lobes, the seat of executive functioning. Executive functions include planning, controlling, and inhibiting thought and behavior. In the aging population, an inability to inhibit unwanted thoughts and behavior causes several social behaviors and cognitions to go awry. In a study appearing in the October issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, University of Queensland psychologist, Bill von Hippel, reports that decreased inhibitory ability in late adulthood can lead to unintended prejudice, social inappropriateness, depression, and gambling problems.
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The Science of Collective Decision-Making
Why do some juries take weeks to reach a verdict, while others take just hours? How do judges pick the perfect beauty queen from a sea of very similar candidates? We have all wondered exactly why we did not win a certain award. Now, new psychological research explains how groups come to a collective decision. Jean-François Bonnefon, a University of Toulouse psychologist, conducted the first empirical investigation of the “doctrinal paradox.” This occurs when judges, say a hiring committee or a jury, must evaluate several factors about a candidate, (e.g. a possible employee or a defendant in a trial) and come to a majority decision.
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Racism’s Cognitive Toll: Subtle discrimination is more taxing on the brain
While certain expressions of racism are absent from our world today, you don’t have to look very hard to know that more subtle forms of racism persist, in schools and workplaces and elsewhere.
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God thoughts influence your generosity
Thoughts related to God cultivate cooperative behavior and generosity, according to University of British Columbia psychology researchers. In a study to be published in the September issue of Psychological Science journal, researchers investigated how thinking about God and notions of a higher power influenced positive social behavior, specifically cooperation with others and generosity to strangers. UBC PhD graduate Azim Shariff and UBC Assoc. Prof. Ara Norenzayan found that priming people with ‘god concepts’ – by activating subconscious thoughts through word games – promoted altruism.
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The More Common the Digit, the More Luminous the Color in Grapheme Color Synaesthesia
A psychological phenomenon known as “grapheme-color synaesthesia” describes individuals who experience vivid colors whenever they see, hear, or think of ordinary letters and digits. A hallmark of synaesthesia is that individuals tend to be idiosyncratic in their experiences, though these experiences are consistent for synaesthetes throughout their lifetime. But new research appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that a particular commonality exists across synaesthetes, who otherwise have very distinctive experiences.
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UCR Psychology Professor Wins Award
The Association for Psychological Science honors Howard Friedman for a lifetime of research that has shaped health psychology. Howard Friedman, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, has won the prestigious James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. The award, which will be presented at the annual convention in Chicago in May 2008, recognizes association members for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to the area of applied psychological research. Recipients’ research must address a critical problem in society at large.
