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Immunity in the Mind
Do our own prejudices and perceptions of people help defend our bodies against infectious disease? An article published in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that our brains contain a sort of "behavioral immune system" that defends against disease even before disease-causing pathogens reach our bodies. Mark Schaller, of the University of British Columbia, who co-authored the article with Justin H.
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On 9/11, Americans may not have been as angry as you thought they were
On September 11, 2001, the air was sizzling with anger—and the anger got hotter as the hours passed. That, anyway, was one finding of a 2010 analysis by Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, and Boris Egloff of 85,000 pager messages sent that day. The researchers employed a commonly used tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, which teases out information from the frequency of word usages in texts. But were Americans really so angry? Clemson University psychologist Cynthia L. S. Pury wasn’t out to answer this question when she made the discovery that was just published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
The Use of Definite References Signals Declarative Memory: Evidence From Patients With Hippocampal Amnesia Melissa C. Duff, Rupa Gupta, Julie A. Hengst, Daniel Tranel, and Neal J. Cohen Most people will use declarative references to save time and mental resources when they are having a conversation. For example, a person might say “the game” instead of “a game” if they know the other person is aware of what they are talking about. To test whether declarative memory was required for the use of definite references, patients with hippocampal amnesia were asked to complete a communication task with a partner they were familiar with.
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Who knows you best? Not you, say psychologists
Know thyself. That was Socrates’ advice, and it squares with conventional wisdom. “It’s a natural tendency to think we know ourselves better than others do,” says Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor Simine Vazire. But a new article by Vazire and her colleague Erika N. Carlson reviews the research and suggests an addendum to the philosopher’s edict: Ask a friend. “There are aspects of personality that others know about us that we don’t know ourselves, and vice-versa,” says Vazire.
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Seeing the Trees and Missing the Forest
The phenomenon known as holistic processing is best known in faces. Most people see faces as a whole, not as two eyes a nose, and a mouth. But holistic processing happens in other cases, too, and can even be taught. One possible explanation is that holistic processing emerges from expertise, but the truth is much more nuanced, according to the authors of a new review published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Holistic processing has been measured for years and years in different ways," says Isabel Gauthier of Vanderbilt University, who co wrote the paper with Jennifer J. Richler, also of Vanderbilt, and Yetta K.
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Dependency and Passivity-You Can Have One without the Other
Think of a dependent person and you think of someone who's needy, high-maintenance, and passive. That's how many psychologists and therapists think of them, too; passivity is key. But dependency is actually more complex and can even have active, positive aspects, writes Robert Bornstein of Adelphi University, the author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Bornstein was sent towards a different concept of dependency by a series of experiments he did in graduate school. He paired a dependent person with a less dependent person and set them to debate an issue they disagreed on.