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More Big News from Big Data
Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, are enabling psychologists to mine giant data sets that allow mega-scale naturalistic observations of human behavior. The recent Society of Personality and...
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New in the APS Observer: Nathan on Trust, David on Social Networks and Health
The April APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan, “The Truth About Trust.” Drawing from the work of Paul Van Lange, it identifies principles of trust—as learned, socially received, reasonable, and...
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Laughter Leads to Self-Disclosure
Many people call laughter the best medicine, but did you know that it can also help you make new friends?It doesn’t surprise me at all. Some of my best friendships have had their roots in belly laughs....
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Do Anger-Prone Communities Suffer More Heart Disease? A Striking Big Data...
As most introductory psychology students learn, negative emotions often affect health. And persistent anger can lash out at one’s own heart.Might negative emotions, such as anger, also be risk factors...
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How Your Brain Makes Reading Easy
Our brains are amazing. I am endlessly fascinated by how the brain works. In nearly every interview I do, the reporter asks, “What part of the brain lights up when that happens?” Now reread the...
View ArticleAn Extreme False Memory—of Committing A Crime
One of the striking discoveries of psychological science is the malleability of memory, as illustrated by the “misinformation effect.” Experiments by Elizabeth Loftus and others exposed participants...
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Does Video Game-Playing Sharpen Mental Skills and Speed?
Despite concerns that video game-playing teaches social scripts for violence, recent research also suggests a cognitive benefit: sharpened visual attention, quickened reaction speed, and improved...
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Happy Tea Drinkers
Some studies put a smile on my face, as happened when reading a new meta-analysis of tea drinking’s association with lower risk of depression. As a tea-drinking happy person, I was pleased that eleven...
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Head-Scratching Paradoxical Findings: Aggregate versus Individual Data Can...
One curiosity of recent psychological science is what I’ve called the “religious engagement paradox”: The association between religious engagement and human flourishing is negative across places and...
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Does Your “Gender Profile” Include Your Race?
It won’t surprise you to learn that your perceived gender, inferred from your biological sex, may lead people to stereotype you as best suited for masculine- or feminine-typed occupations. People...
View ArticleDiversity in Human Sexuality
I was alerted, by this article in Nature, to a new report on sexual orientation from the Academy of Science of South Africa. The report is state of the art. It’s lucid and easily readable. It gets...
View ArticleMore Data Bites: Quick News You Can Use
From the daily information stream that flows across my desk or up my computer screen, here is a recent new flashes:How marital support gets under the skin. A mountain of research shows that good...
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Why Children Dance the Best
Not long ago, I enjoyed one of my favorite summer pastimes. With a close friend, I attended a Major League Baseball game. My team got clobbered, it rained, and I forgot to bring home the free Johnny...
View ArticleMore Data Bites: Quick News You Can Use
From the daily information stream that flows across my desk or up my computer screen, here is a recent news flash:Global data on mental illness. New global disease data published this week by The...
View ArticleMore Data Bites: Quick News You Can Use
From the daily information stream that flows across my desk or up my computer screen, here is a recent news flash:Global hearing loss. As an advocate for people with hearing loss (see here), I also...
View ArticleMore Data Bites: Quick News You Can Use
From the daily information stream that flows across my desk or up my computer screen, here is a recent news flash:Money matters more to midlife folks than to those younger and older. There’s a modest...
View ArticleAsexuals—The Unnoticed Sexual Minority
Sherlock Holmes famously solved the “Silver Blaze” case by noticing what no one else had—the dog that didn’t bark. What grabs our attention is seldom the absence of something, but rather its visible...
View ArticleMore Data Bites: Quick News You Can Use
From the daily information stream that flows across my desk or up my computer screen, here is a recent news flash:With age we mellow. A European research team led by Annette Brose sampled people’s...
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Do People Vividly Remember—or Repress—Memories of Traumatic, Life-Threatening...
Imagine yourself on a Toronto to Lisbon flight. Five hours after takeoff and with open seas beneath you, your pilots become aware of fuel loss (a fractured fuel line is leaking a gallon per second)....
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Love Sees Loveliness
It seems unfair . . . that mere skin-deep beauty should predict, as it has in so many studies, people’s dating frequency, popularity, job interview impressions, and income, not to mention their...
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