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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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New Research From Psychological Science
Asymmetry in Resting Intracortical Activity as a Buffer to Social Threat Katrina Koslov, Wendy Barry Mendes, Petra E. Pajtas, and Diego A. Pizzagalli People respond to social rejection differently. To investigate whether differences in resting cortical brain activity could be responsible for different responses to social rejection, 84 women were asked to write a brief speech then read it in front of two other people. The individuals watching the speech would either frown and act like they hated the speech (threat condition) or provide positive feedback and encouragement (evaluation condition).
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Two Sides of Emotional Intelligence
People often assume that having good emotional intelligence makes you a better person. Not so, say the authors of a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Emotional skills can be used for good or for evil—for the betterment of the group or for humiliating your coworkers. A popular book on emotional intelligence that came out in the mid 1990s equated emotional intelligence with good character.
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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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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.
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Stress Higher in Children With Depressed Parents
Children with depressed parents get stressed out more easily than children with healthy parents—if the depressed parents are negative toward their child. That's the conclusion of a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study is part of a long-term look at how a child's early temperament is related to the risk for depression. The children were recruited for the study when they were three years old, an age when depression is rare. Thus, the researchers expect to see depression appear as the children grow.
