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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Object-Based Attention Without Awareness Liam J. Norman, Charles A. Heywood, and Robert W. Kentridge Attentional selection can facilitate the processing of basic properties of unseen stimuli; however, it is still unknown whether this selection extends to more complex properties of stimuli. Participants performed a task in which a cue appeared inside one of two rectangles that were masked from their conscious attention. After the cue, a target appeared in one of the masked rectangles. Participants processed targets appearing within the same rectangle as the cue more rapidly than they processed targets in the other rectangle.
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Weight Gain Tied To Personality Changes, Impulsivity: Study
The Huffington Post: Your weight may be linked with your personality, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. Researchers from the Florida State University College of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health found that people who have experienced weight gain were more likely to be both impulsive and deliberate in their actions. "If mind and body are intertwined, then if one changes the other should change too," study researcher Angelina Sutin, of the Florida State University College of Medicine, said in a statement.
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How Positive Emotions Lead to Better Health
Pacific Standard: We’ve all experienced downward spirals, in which dark emotions lead to destructive behavior that damages our health, strains our relationships, and leaves us feeling even worse than when we started. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an uplifting equivalent to that destructive chain of events? Newly published research suggests there is. What’s more, this delightful dynamic helps explain the well-documented link between joy, appreciation, and good health.
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Kahneman and Bentham’s Bucket of Happiness
Scientific American: We need a new happiness. The one most people use now is confusing even our smartest scientists. The problems start with “Bentham’s bucket error” but Plato’s pastry and a rare case of reality in Freud can revive healthier pursuits of happiness. Daniel Kahneman, who has plausibly been called the “most important psychologist alive today,” has spent a decade experimenting with “hedonimetrics,” which analyzes “single happiness values” assigned to each moments felt pleasure or pain. Commendably candid, he concludes: “we have learned many new facts about happiness.
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You’ll Never Learn!
Slate: Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers. For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied.
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Are ‘Hot Hands’ in Sports a Real Thing?
The New York Times: Winning streaks in sports may be more than just magical thinking, several new studies suggest. Whether you call them winning streaks, “hot hands” or being “in the zone,” most sports fans believe that players, and teams, tend to go on tears. Case in point: Nate Robinson’s almost single-handed evisceration of the Miami Heat on Monday night. (Yes, I am a Bulls fan.) But our faith in hot hands is challenged by a rich and well-regarded body of science over the past 30 years, much of it focused on basketball, that tells us our belief is mostly fallacious. ...
