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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: A Safe Haven: Investigating Social-Support Figures as Prepared Safety Stimuli Erica A. Hornstein, Michael S. Fanselow, and Naomi I. Eisenberger Research has shown that fear learning occurs more readily with certain stimuli such as snakes and spiders, perhaps because these types of stimuli have historically threatened humans' survival. Although fear conditioning to these prepared fear stimuli has been examined, little research has studied their parallels -- prepared safety stimuli (i.e., stimuli that have historically benefited survival).
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Failure, Emotions, and Explaining It to Your Boss
We all make mistakes in the workplace at one point or another, but is there an optimal way to explain it to your supervisor? In a 2015 paper published by Europe’s Journal of Psychology, David and Hareli Shlomo and APS Fellow Ursula Hess investigated whether showing emotion (or the lack thereof) and whether admitting guilt, blaming someone else, or giving an ambiguous response after a service failure could impact the believability of an employee’s account and their chances of being fired or promoted. The researchers recruited business school alumni from the University of Haifa in Israel to participate in an online experiment.
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Talking With Your Hands Makes You Learn Things Faster
New York Magazine: One of the funniest things about being a tall, goofy person with a long history of wild gesticulation is that the more animated a conversation gets, the more likely I am to knock over a glass of red wine at a dinner table or accidentally wallop a stranger on the subway. Beyond being a real hit on dates or interviews, it’s an embarrassing piece of the growing pile of evidence that gestures are cognitive, an idea with an impressive amount of psychological literature behind it. ... The University of Chicago psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow has spent much of her career trying to grasp (yes, pun intended) what’s happening when people talk with their hands.
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Is It Time To Ban Computers From Classrooms?
NPR: Every semester, college instructors face a choice: whether to restrict the use of laptops and other devices in their classrooms or to, instead, let students decide for themselves. And for classrooms that do allow devices, students face an ongoing set of choices: to take notes electronically or by hand, to check the textbook or the text message, to check Instagram or Twitter. ... A second possibility is that even legitimate course uses — such as taking notes — could be less effective on a computer.
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Teens: this is how social media affects your brain
CNN: Whether you're on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, What's App or Twitter, the way you communicate with friends today is changing. Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain? ... "When teens learn that their own pictures have supposedly received a lot of likes, they show significantly greater activation in parts of the brain's reward circuitry," says lead author Lauren Sherman.
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Virgin Atlantic just used behavioral science to ‘nudge’ its pilots into using less fuel. It worked
The Washington Post: In an unusual experiment that could have major implications for the role of corporations in fighting climate change, Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic Airways recently teamed up with economists to try to “nudge” the company’s pilots to use less fuel, using a variety of behavioral interventions. And it apparently worked. The intervention was so cost effective, the researchers say, that it “outperforms every other reported carbon abatement technology of which we are aware.” Read the whole story: The Washington Post
