Psychology

In a new Cerebral Cortex study, researchers say they can predict a person's performance on a video game simply by measuring the volume of specific structures in their brain. The authors found that nearly a quarter of the variability in achievement seen among men and women trained on a new video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three structures in their brains. The study adds to the evidence that specific parts of the striatum, a collection of distinctive tissues tucked deep inside the cerebral cortex, profoundly influence a person's ability to refine his or her motor skills…

Some pyschologists suggests that too many choices can negatively impact our health. But a meta-analysis of 50 published and unpublished experiments that investigated choice overload  found that consumers generally respond positively to having many choices. Across the 50 experiments, which depict the choices of 5,036 individual participants, the authors found that the overall effect of choice overload was virtually zero. "This suggests that adverse consequences do not necessarily follow from increases in the number of options," the authors write. "In fact, contrary to the notion of choice…

Hard workers who are motivated to achieve generally excel on specific tasks when they are reminded of the benefits of their hard work. But when a task is presented as fun, researchers report in a new Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study, the same hard-working individuals are often outperformed by those less motivated to achieve. The findings suggest that two students may respond quite differently to a teacher's exhortation that they strive for excellence, said University of Illinois psychology professor Dolores Albarracín, who conducted the research with William Hart, of the…

Thanks to capitalism and a cultural heritage of individual freedom, Americans enjoy just about ever modern convenience imaginable and do almost anything they want. But, according to psychologists from Standford University and Swarthmore College, the amount of choice that results from such a decadent lifestyle may be unhealthy. The researchers say that too many choices cause Americans to ignore how the rest of the world feels about choice and may even make us selfish and depressed. In their Journal of Consumer Research study, the authors explain that this emphasis on choice and freedom is not…

The next time you want to convince someone to vote for your favored political candidate, or to buy a certain product, use abstract language, say the authors of a new study published in the The Journal of Consumer Research. The study found that consumers respond  better to product descriptions when they are framed in abstract as opposed to concrete terms. "Our finding that abstract messages have a stronger impact on buying intentions can be translated straightforwardly into the recommendation to use abstract language if you try to convince someone of the (positive or negative)…

The Athena Festival accentuates celebrating “the wisdom of women”, and indeed at the gathering that I attended, there did seem to be an air of celebration and excitement.  In addition to a multigenerational female turnout, a few stout-hearted and deferential men were also present, with some even visibly interested in the topics being discussed.  Booths laden with merchandise geared towards women’s spiritual and fashion tastes were doing brisk business, while event rooms were almost packed with enthusiastic onlookers.  Inundated psychics, Tarot, and palm readers were mostly…

What we learn from our siblings when we grow up has a considerable influence on our social and emotional development as adults, according to researchers from the the University of Illinois and the University of California, Davis. The team says that a clearer understanding of how siblings function as "agents of socialization" will help answer critical societal questions such as why some children pursue antisocial behavior. Their volume on the subject appears in a recent issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. "What we learn from our parents may overlap quite a bit with…

Writing in Psychological Sciences, researchers from New York University and Cornell University say they've demonstrated that our desires influence how we see our environments. According to the new research, we view things we want as being physically closer to us than they actually are. The authors say this bias exists to encourage us to pursue things that we want by making them appear close. When we see a goal as being close to us (literally within our reach), it motivates us to keep on going to successfully attain it.  During the study, participants estimated how far a water bottle was…

In a just-published series of studies involving hundreds of volunteers, University of Georgia and Duke University psychologists say that watching or even thinking about someone with good self-control makes others more likely exert self-control. The research found that the opposite holds, too; people with bad self-control influence others negatively. The effect is so powerful, in fact, that seeing the name of someone with good or bad self-control flashing on a screen for just 10 milliseconds changed the behavior of volunteers. People tend to mimic the behavior of those around them, and…

While exerting willpower is an important part of losing weight, new evidence suggests that their may be more to successful dieting than simply trying to eat less. Cognitive scientists from Indiana University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin have found that the perceived complexity of diets themselves can also have a big influence on the pounds shed. Their research was published in the journal Appetite. The study examined both the objective and subjective complexity of two diet plans. Brigitte, the cognitively simpler of the two, is a popular German recipe diet…