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Teens’ Memory for Faces Shifts Toward Peers During Puberty
Adolescents begin to view faces differently as they prepare for the transition to adulthood, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "We know that faces convey a lot of different social information, and the ability to perceive and interpret this information changes through development,” explained psychological scientist Suzy Scherf of Penn State, senior author on the study.
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Asking for directions
The Boston Globe: If stereotypes are to be believed, women are poor navigators, while men won’t ask for directions. But maybe that’s not the right perspective. Students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, were given “two timed pencil-and-paper tests of perspective-taking ability: the object-perspective/spatial-orientation test and the standardized road-map test of direction sense.” Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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You’re Joking: Detecting Sarcasm in Emails Isn’t Easy
“Well, that meeting was a really fantastic use of my time.” You may want to think twice before hitting send on that email with a sarcastic joke – regardless of whether your boss or your work buddies are on the receiving end. New research investigating how we determine the emotional content of text is showing that people have a very hard time catching on to sarcasm in emails and texts. This means that written communications aren’t the best medium for making a well-meaning joke; people often interpret a friendly riff as being overtly negative, or they don’t catch the sarcastic tone at all and assume a caustic jibe is actually praise.
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Exploring How Women’s Reproductive Health and Mental Health Intersect
Throughout their lives, women’s risk for various mental health problems fluctuates along with reproductive changes, yet research in psychological science seldom investigates the intersection of reproductive health and mental health. A special series in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, addresses these intersecting issues directly, presenting a collection of research articles that takes a multilevel, integrative view of women’s mental health in the context of reproductive development.
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Yours or Mine? How We Handle Objects Depends on Who Owns Them
From scissors and staplers to car keys and cell phones, we pass objects to other people every day. We often try to pass the objects so that the handle or other useful feature is facing the appropriate direction for the person receiving the item, but new research shows that we’re less accommodating when it comes to handing over our own belongings. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “The associations or attachments that we have with an object leak into our movements in unintended ways when we interact with them,” says psychology researcher and study author Merryn Constable of the University of Toronto.
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The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence
The New York Times: ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are. It all started in the early 1970s, when the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky conducted an influential series of experiments showing that all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality. Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason.
