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Obama Administration Elevates Role of Behavioral Science in Government Services
Behavioral science will have an increasingly integral role in the way the US government operates and provides services under a new set of actions by the White House. President Obama signed an executive order September 15 directing federal agencies to inject more behavioral science into their activities and services. That order also formally establishes a federal Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), a group of experts in behavioral science tasked with translating scientific findings into improvements in federal programs.
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Are Impulsivity Problems Memory Problems?
Everyone seems to know at least one person who could be described as impulsive. That person whose brain — and mouth — seem to go a mile a minute, who does things without thinking them through, and who often gives up when they feel the going gets tough. Impulsivity has been associated with a host of problems including diminished cognitive abilities, vigilance, and executive functioning. No study, however, has examined the relationship between impulsivity and prospective memory. Prospective memory refers to a person’s ability to create plans for the future and then remember to execute them at the appropriate time.
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When Trauma Isn’t Traumatic
Longitudinal data collected from university students suggest that exposure to an acute trauma may be linked with an improvement in symptoms of anxiety or depression for some individuals. The research, led by Anthony Mancini of Pace University and co-authors Heather Littleton of East Carolina University and Amie E. Grills of Boston University, investigated human resilience in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred in 2007. The shooting left 33 people dead (including the shooter) and 25 others injured, making it the most deadly civilian shooting in U.S. history.
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How Effective Is Telecommuting? Assessing the Status of Our Scientific Findings
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 16, Number 2) Read the Full Test (PDF, HTML) The term telecommuting was first coined in the early 1970s, and since that time the number of people taking advantage of the ability to work remotely has grown dramatically. By 1997, more than 100,000 U.S. federal employees were telecommuting, and by 2014, more than 3.3 million U.S. workers reported their home as their primary place of work. This number is only expected to grow as a result of the increasingly global nature of our economic and employment systems.
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DARPA Seeks Information on Experimental Falsifiability
Psychological scientists have called for an increased focus on replication to strengthen the reproducibility of scientific research. Now, other groups are beginning to follow suit: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), best known for developing emerging technologies for the military, has taken an interest in evaluating research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. This month, DARPA put out a request for information (RFI) seeking tools and approaches for disconfirming models, theories, and hypotheses.
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Mischel, Other Golden Goose Awardees, to Be Honored in DC
The fourth annual Golden Goose Awards ceremony will be held Sept. 17 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., with APS Past President Walter Mischel and two other psychological scientists among the 2015 honorees. The final group of awardees was announced today. Joel E. Cohen, a mathematical population biologist, and Christopher Small, a geophysicist, are being honored for their groundbreaking work on “hysopgraphic demography” – the study of how human populations are distributed by altitude and how that exposes them to varied geophysical and biological hazards.
