Priming Affiliation Increases Helping Behavior in Infants
Association for Psychological ScienceIn a new study in Psychological Science, researchers found that priming infants with subtle cues to affiliation increases their tendency to be helpful.
In a new study in Psychological Science, researchers found that priming infants with subtle cues to affiliation increases their tendency to be helpful.
Folk wisdom usually has it that “seeing is believing,” but new research suggests that “believing is seeing,” too – at least when it comes to perceiving other people’s emotions.
Music is one of the surest ways to influence human emotions; most people unconsciously recognize and respond to music that is happy, sad, fearful or mellow. But psychologists who have tried to trace the evolutionary roots of these responses usually hit a dead end. Nonhuman primates scarcely respond to human music, and instead prefer silence.
A new book by researchers from across the world explores the contexts within which individuals, families, and communities develop and change – and strategies for improving life.
Every March, most Americans welcome the switch to daylight saving time because of the longer days, but also dread losing an hour of sleep after they move their clocks forward. Now a new study shows that losing just an hour of sleep could pose some dangerous consequences for those in hazardous work environments.
More than 12,000 children under the age of 20 are diagnosed with cancer each year. Although these children and their parents undergo a tremendous amount of stress during this time, researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that most children are able to cope with their diagnosis without experiencing high levels of depression or anxiety. In a study published this year in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, researchers found a group of 75 kids with cancer adjusted surprisingly well within the first year of diagnosis.
Weighty. Heavy. What do these words have to do with seriousness and importance? Why do we weigh our options, and why does your opinion carry more weight than mine? New research suggests that we can blame this on gravity.
The advantage that children get from living in two-parent families may actually be due to family stability more than the fact that their parents are married, a new study suggests.
A new study shows just what it takes to convince a person that he isn’t qualified to achieve the career of his dreams. Researchers found that it’s not enough to tell people they don’t have the skills or the grades to make their goal a reality.
According to a recent study, it appears humans are not actually capable of "turning off" another language entirely--knowledge of a second language actually has a continuous impact on native-language reading.
Although Asian-Americans as a group have lower rates of thinking about and attempting suicide than the national average, U.S.-born Asian-American women seem to be particularly at risk for suicidal behavior.
Being a victim of sexual assault and seeking help is difficult for anyone, but when the victim is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) the thought of reporting a crime may well be laced with added layers of uncertainty and mistrust, according to a study in Oregon.
About one-third of children with a parent deployed in the Global War on Terror are at high risk for psychosocial problems, suggests a study in the August issue of the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics.
Merely seeing a smile (or a frown, for that matter) will activate the muscles in our face that make that expression, even if we are unaware of it. Now, according to a new study, simply reading emotion verbs may also have the same effect.
"That blasted siren. I can't focus." That reaction to undesired distraction may signal a person's low working-memory capacity, according to a new study. Based on a study of 84 students divided into four separate experiments, University of Oregon researchers found that students with high memory storage capacity were clearly better able to ignore distractions and stay focused on their assigned tasks.
Professor Robert Feldman says most of what we know about how and why people lie is wrong. Lying is common and people willingly accept and often welcome the lies they are told, he says. And it's hard to identify lying and liars. Feldman's new book, "The Liar in Your Life," has just been published.
Research conducted by Dr. Taylor Plumb and Dr. Diane Zelman from the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University shows high rates of disturbed sleep and indicators of possible sleep disorders experienced by current and former military personnel who served in Afghanistan or Iraq during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) or Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).
New research from the Kellogg School of Management demonstrates that individuals believe they have more restraint than they actually possess"”ultimately leading to poor decision-making.
A stable, long-term marriage can be good for your health, but divorce or widowhood leave a lasting scar on the health of middle-aged and older people, according to a new study. Remarriage seems to reduce but not erase the damage done by losing a marriage, and those who remain single after a marriage ends show consistently worse health than those who remarried.
A new report reveals that students who were the most devoted to their school to begin with were also the most cooperative and helpful when forced to confront the school's failings. That is, those truest to their group redoubled their sense of service and commitment when faced with injustice.
A new report explores the many ways psychology has contributed to, and continues to research, the science of living well.
Say a deadly campus shooting occurs. It might seem sensible to offer everyone on campus psychological support to prevent psychological repercussions, including PTSD. However, a new review suggests the opposite.
Reporters pursuing stories about the growing controversy over cell phone use while driving may want to consider talking to Steven Yantis, a psychology professor at The Johns Hopkins University.
We've all experienced feeling sick following a particularly stressful time at work or school, but can stress actually make us sick? A new report reviews research investigating how stress can wreak havoc on our bodies and provides some suggestions to further our understanding of this connection.
Why are some people smarter than others? A new article describes how certain aspects of brain structure and function help determine how easily we learn new things, and how learning capacity contributes to individual differences in intelligence.
Education is on the cusp of a transformation because of recent scientific findings in neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning that are converging to create foundations for a new science of learning.
How well do you know yourself? It's a question many of us struggle with, as we try to figure out how close we are to who we actually want to be. A new report describes theories behind self-knowledge, cites challenges to studying it, and offers ways we can get to know ourselves a little better.
Ask middle-school students if they are popular or make friends easily, they likely will depend on social comparisons with their peers for an answer. Such reliance on the perceived opinions of others, or reflected self-appraisals, has long been assumed, but new evidence supporting this claim has now been found in the teen brain.
According to a new report in Psychological Science, children's temperament may be due in part to a combination of a certain gene and a specific pattern of brain activity.
Mothers of children with autism had higher levels of parenting-related stress and psychological distress than mothers of children with developmental delay. Children's problem behavior was associated with increases in both parenting-related stress and distress in both groups, but this relationship was stronger in moms of children with autism.
Psychologists Joanne V. Wood and John W. Lee from the University of Waterloo, and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic from the University of New Brunswick, found that individuals with low self-esteem actually felt worse about themselves after repeating positive self-statements.
In 2005, a surprising number of people stayed behind and rode out Hurricane Katrina. Stanford University psychologist Nicole Stephens and her colleagues compared the views of outside observers with the perspectives of the New Orleans residents who actually rode out Katrina.
Organizational norms and social cues, not communication overload, are the strongest predictors of whether individuals use their laptops or smart phones to electronically multitask during a meeting, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.
We swim in a sea of information, but filter out most of what we see or hear. New analysis of data from dozens of studies sheds new light on how we choose what we do and do not hear. The study found that while people tend to avoid information that contradicts what they already think or believe, certain factors can cause them to seek out, or at least consider, other points of view.
A study of the behaviors elicited from the musical lyrics of common songs is showing that patriotic songs may make participants close-minded and prejudiced while songs like "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" may stimulate a pro-social response.
A new study validates the controversial finding that the Implicit Association Test indicated that about 70 percent of those people who took a version of the test that measures racial attitudes have unconscious preference for white people compared to blacks. This compared with figures general under 20 percent for self-reported measures of race bias.
Our tendency to see people and faces as individuals may explain why we are such experts at recognizing them, new research indicates. This approach can be learned and applied to other objects as well.
These results reveal that we tend to view products that are grouped close together as being "contagious." It appears that if one of the products has a prominent good or bad quality, we will see that quality as spreading among other objects which are close by, a phenomenon known as the "group-contagion effect."
Research led by a leading expert on the positive benefits of napping at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep enhances creative problem-solving. The findings may have important implications for how sleep, specifically REM sleep, fosters the formation of associative networks in the brain.
A new speed dating study finds that, regardless of gender, participants who rotated experienced greater romantic desire for and chemistry with their partners, compared to participants who sat throughout the event. The results suggest a fascinating alternative explanation for the sex difference in romantic selectivity.
Why does dishing with a girlfriend do wonders for a woman's mood? A University of Michigan study has identified a likely reason: feeling emotionally close to a friend increases levels of the hormone progesterone, helping to boost well-being and reduce anxiety and stress.
For more than a century, the notion that females are innately less capable than males at doing mathematics, especially at the highest levels, has persisted in even the loftiest circles.
Spending hours taking a high-pressure aptitude test may make people feel mentally fatigued, but that fatigue doesn't necessarily lead to lower test scores, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. If anything, performance might actually improve on a longer test, the study found.
University of Virginia psychologists and computer scientists have found that gender is less important than head motion in the nonverbal dynamics of human conversation.
Helping middle school students with their homework may not be the best way to get them on the honor roll. But telling them how important academic performance is to their future job prospects and providing specific strategies to study and learn might clinch the grades, according to a research review.
Many schools across the nation struggle in their efforts to deal with challenging behaviors. A new book co-authored by Kathleen Lane, associate professor of special education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of education and human development, aims to help schools develop a comprehensive strategy to identify and help students with behavior issues before violence erupts.
"The findings show that trauma from a mother's past, which does not directly impact her pregnancy, will affect her offspring's emotional and social behavior. We should consider whether such effects occur in humans too," stated Prof. Micah Leshem who carried out the study.
These results suggest that five-month-old infants are able to discriminate a solid from a similar-looking liquid, based on movement cues "” that is, according to how an object moved around in the container, the infants could predict if it will pour or tumble from the glass if it is upended.
The results suggest that phonological constancy (recognizing words in different dialects) is already evident by 19 months of age, but is not yet present at 15 months.
A new study suggests that a moderate dose of alcohol increases a person's mind wandering, while at the same time reducing the likelihood of noticing that one's mind has wandered.