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Estes Fund Grants Aim to Raise Awareness of Computational Tools
The William K. and Katherine W. Estes Fund, which was created to honor the legacy of influential psychological scientist Bill Estes, has awarded three grants for programs focused on increasing awareness of how computational tools, models, and data collection can improve all areas of psychological science. Overseen jointly by APS and the Psychonomic Society, the Fund supports summer schools and workshops offering training in mathematical and computational modeling for PhD students, postdocs, and advanced researchers. It also promotes the teaching and practice of rigorous methodology in experimental and quantitative psychological science.
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Popular People Live Longer
The New York Times: I often hear from teenagers that one of their greatest goals is to obtain more Instagram followers than anyone they know. Even some adults appear obsessed with social media, tracking the number of retweets on their Twitter profiles or likes on Facebook. This type of status-seeking might be easily dismissed as juvenile or superficial, but there’s more to it. Recent evidence suggests that being unpopular can be hazardous to our health. In fact, it might even kill us. Yet most don’t realize that there’s more than one type of popularity, and social media may not supply the one that makes us feel good.
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IMAGINATION CAN RESTRAIN IMPULSIVENESS
Pacific Standard: As Washington watchers are well aware, bad decisions are often the product of impulsiveness. Whether it's our choice of what to eat for lunch or our nation's policy on climate change, we too often make choices that produce immediate gratification, but ultimately produce harm. Psychological research suggests this is, to some degree, innate. Experiments have shown that small kids who can't resist reaching for a marshmallow have less successful adult lives, due to that inability to resist temptation in favor of pursing long-term goals. But according to a new study, there may be a simple way to focus our minds on the bigger picture.
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Death becomes you
The Boston Globe: An analysis of the blog postings of terminally ill people and the last words of Texas death-row inmates revealed that they were more positive and less negative than what the general public wrote when asked to imagine themselves in the same positions. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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The things dying people care about reveal a lot about how to live
Quartz: Ask people to imagine what they’d say if they knew they were dying and most would have words of sadness, fear, and regret. But new psychological research bolsters what chaplains, hospice workers, and others who spend a lot of time in the company of those approaching the end of life have long known: the process of dying is a complicated one, with room for moments of profundity and light alongside fear and darkness. In a series of experiments documented in the journal Psychological Science, researchers compared the blog posts of terminally ill people and the last words of death row inmates to the words of healthy people asked to imagine themselves writing near their death.
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New NIAAA Strategic Plan Aims to Advance Behavioral Treatments for Alcohol Abuse
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), one of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers and a leading funder of basic and applied psychological science at NIH, released a new strategic plan detailing the institute’s priorities over the next five years. A key area of focus is to better understand the role behavior plays in alcohol use and abuse—as is the value of behavioral treatments in treating misuse of alcohol. “Alcohol misuse still claims the lives of 88,000 Americans each year, making it the fourth-leading preventable cause of death in the United States,” said NIAAA Director and APS Fellow George F. Koob in introducing the new aims.
