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Why Your Office Isn’t Doing You Any Favors
The business world is not known for being warm and fuzzy, but new research demonstrates that the workplace really can stifle generous behavior. “In five studies, using both attitudinal and behavioral measures, we consistently found that people primed to think of themselves in an organizational context (e.g., co-worker) felt less motivated to reciprocate, and did reciprocate than those in an otherwise parallel personal (e.g., friend or acquaintance) situation,” writes Stanford University researchers Peter Belmi and Jeffrey Pfeffer. Previous research has shown that reciprocation is a strong, and often automatic, social norm.
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Studies Suggest Multilingual Exposure Boosts Children’s Communication Skills
NPR: NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Katherine Kinzler, associate professor of psychology and human development at Cornell University, about her research into the social skills developed by children raised in multilingual environments versus monolingual environments. Read the whole story: NPR
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Most people aren’t resilient to life’s hardships, researchers find
Quartz: Previous research has found that, when faced with a negative life event, most people fare well when left well alone. Studies found that, after divorce, unemployment, or the death of a spouse, the majority of people proved resilient, maintaining stable high life satisfaction scores before and after each event. But these findings have been questioned in a paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science this month. ... Co-author Frank Infurna told Science Daily that it shows it can be far better to intervene and help people cope with negative life events.
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Watching Cat Videos at Work Could Make You More Productive
TIME: Go ahead and watch that supercut of cats freaking out when they see a cucumber one more time: Scientists say it could make you more productive at work. In a paper for the Journal of Business and Psychology, an Australian study found that when experiment subjects were given a boring job to do, then exposed to something funny, they worked twice as long as subjects who watched videos about nature or business management. Read the whole story: TIME
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Nature Wants Your Replication Data
Have you replicated, or tried to replicate, a research study and want to share the data you generated with the scientific community? APS recognizes authors of published articles who make their data publicly available with an Open Data badge. But one journal is soliciting data from unpublished replication work, too. Scientific Data, a journal of the Nature Publishing Group, has announced a call for submissions for replication data. Psychological scientists who have collected replication data on a study that has already been published in a peer-reviewed journal are invited to submit an article for consideration for this special collection.
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NIMH Launches User-Friendly RDoC Matrix Format
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) recently announced an update to the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative. RDoC is a new research framework for studying mental disorders by focusing on fundamental neurobehavioral processes using integrative and complementary methods. While the content of the RDoC Matrix will remain the same, a new user-friendly redesign offers improved navigation, a better user experience, and responsive design, which makes the matrix easier to read and navigate on mobile and desktop devices.
