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Crossing the Line: What Constitutes Torture?
Torture. The United Nations defines it as the “infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” But how severe is severe? That judgment determines whether or not the law classifies an interrogation practice as torture. Now, a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, condemns this method of classification as essentially flawed. The reason: The people estimating the severity of pain aren’t experiencing that pain—so they underestimate it. As a result, many acts of torture are not classified—or prohibited—as torture, say authors, Loran F.
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Actions and Personality, East and West
People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds. Cultural differences are evident very deep in the brain, challenging a commonsense notion that culture is skin deep. For decades, psychologists believed that it's natural for humans to see behaviors and automatically link them to personality.
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Some People’s Climate Beliefs Shift With Weather
Results from three studies show that people who thought the current day was warmer than usual were more likely to believe in and feel concern about global warming than those who thought the day was unusually cold.
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Happiness, Comparatively Speaking: How We Think About Life’s Rewards
You win some, you lose some. You get the perfect job—the one your heart is set on. Or you get snubbed. You win the girl (or guy) of your dreams—or you strike out. Such are life’s ups and downs. But what if you win and lose at the same time? You land a good job—but not a great one. Or you do get a plum offer—but not the one you wanted? A study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, says you’ll find a way to be happy anyway. “Good outcomes have relative value and absolute value, and that affects our happiness,” explains Carnegie Mellon assistant professor Karim S.
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Greased Palm Psychology: Collectivism and Bribery
Cultures that downplay self-determination and stress shared responsibility may serve as a catalyst for passing money under the table, a study suggests.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory: Ensemble Statistics Bias Memory for Individual Items Timothy F. Brady and George A. Alvarez Current models of visual working memory assume that people encode memories of objects individually. Yet, new research has shown that items surrounding an object can influence a person’s recollection of it. When observers were asked to recall the size of a single circle after viewing an image with multiple circles, they tended to report a larger size if the other circles were large and a smaller size if the surrounding circles were small.