It ’s Surprisingly Common To Misremember Where You Were On A Specific Time And Date
By Emma Young
Where were you at 8am two Tuesdays ago? If it’s a little tricky to recall, what if I presented you with a map with four location flags to choose from, each about 3-4 km apart, with one marking your actual location on that time and date? Are you confident that you’d pick the right one?
If you are confident, the good news from a new paper in Psychological Science is that you’re more likely to be right than if you’re not too sure. The bad news is that when a group of students in Melbourne, Australia was tested in this way, they picked the wrong location 36% of the time. The study shows that this...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - June 7, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Forensic Memory Source Type: blogs
Magic Tricks And Media Literacy: The Week ’s Best Psychology Links
Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web
Sleep researchers often takes a “brain-centric” approach to their work, measuring sleep stages using EEG, for instance, or examining how sleep affects learning and memory. Yet rudimentary creatures also sleep — including the hydra, an aquatic organism which has a basic nervous system but no brain at all. The findings suggest that our primitive ancestors slept before they even evolved brains, writes Veronique Greenwood at Wired.
In his recent testimony to a House of Commons committee, Dominic Cummings blamed “groupthink...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - June 4, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs
Even Some Meat-Eaters Are Disgusted By Meat — And Encouraging Those Feelings Could Help Reduce Consumption
By Emily Reynolds
While some vegetarians yearn for meat (and occasionally give into temptation), others who eschew animal products find meat repulsive. Those who go veggie for moral reasons — as opposed to those who do it for their health — are particularly likely to find meat disgusting, even if they previously enjoyed its taste.
According to a new study from a University of Exeter team, it isn’t just vegetarians who find the look of meat disgusting, either — sometimes, meat-eaters do too. And in a world where many of us are being encouraged to give up meat for the sake of the environment, the researchers ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - June 3, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Eating Source Type: blogs
Poor Self-Control Can Lead To Feelings Of Loneliness
By Emily Reynolds
Loneliness can be something of a vicious cycle. As previous research has suggested, your personality can increase your likelihood of being lonely, and loneliness can impact your personality. We also know that self-centredness can increase loneliness, that being true to yourself can reduce loneliness, and that even warming yourself up on a cold day can ease cravings for social contact.
Loneliness, then, is highly dependent on personality factors as well as social factors such as discrimination, limited access to transport, and lack of social cohesion. And a new study, published in Personality an...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - June 2, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Personality Social Source Type: blogs
Electric Fish And Children ’s Play: The Week’s Best Psychology Links
Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web
Electric fish seem to have mastered the art of the pause, writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic. Brienomyrus brachyistius communicate by producing a series of electrical pulses. But researchers have found that the fish sometimes pause during their “conversations”, apparently as a signal that what they are about to communicate is important — similar to a “dramatic pause” in human speech.
As we covered in a recent podcast, play is a vital part of children’s development. But how do the toys we choose to give kids shape the...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 28, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs
Financial Stress In Early Adulthood Is Related To Physical Pain Decades Later
By Emily Reynolds
Pain is not a purely biological phenomenon: discrimination, anxiety around work, and general mental strain have all been shown to contribute to the experience of chronic pain. Many researchers therefore take a biopsychosocial approach, exploring the multifarious factors that impact on and are impacted by pain.
A new study in Stress & Health explores the long term consequences of social factors on pain. The team, from the universities of Georgia and South California, Los Angeles, specifically focus on families involved in the 1980s “farm crisis” in the US Midwest, a period where many lost th...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 27, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Health Money Source Type: blogs
We Feel More Empathy Towards Citizens Of Countries With Good, Popular Leaders
By Emma Young
We could all name groups of people who we know to be suffering right now; some in distant countries, some in our own. Research shows that we feel less empathy for people in other countries — and so are less likely to support them by protesting, say, or donating money. Meital Balmas and Eran Halperin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem now report a factor that can influence this, however: our feelings about the national leader. The pair’s study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that a leader who is perceived as “good” and popular at home elicits more empathy, and even...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 26, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: leadership Personality Social Source Type: blogs
Drug Researchers Who Admit To Using Psychedelics Are Seen As Having Less Integrity
By Matthew Warren
In the past few years, psychologists and neuroscientists have conducted a large number of studies into the effects of psychedelic drugs. Some have sought to better understand the effects of the drugs in the brain, while others are investigating the potential for substances like psilocybin and LSD to treat depression and other mental health conditions.
This work obviously require tactful communication on the part of researchers: after all, they don’t want to alienate a public who may be at best ambivalent about the use of currently illegal drugs in research or mental health settings. Now a recent ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 25, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Drugs Source Type: blogs
Cats Like To Sit In Squares — Even Ones That Are Really Optical Illusions
By Emma Young
The world is not exactly short of videos of cute cats up to strange antics. But one particular set of videos collected by cat owners during a COVID-19 lockdown reveals something genuinely interesting: a famous optical illusion that fools us also gets cats. The citizen science project, in which cats were experimented on in their own homes, shows that they, too, are tricked by “Kanizsa squares”, an illusion that suggests the presence of a square that doesn’t in fact exist.
It’s well known that cats love to sit in enclosed spaces, like boxes. They even like to sit in square shapes made...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 24, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Cognition Comparative Illusions Source Type: blogs
Egalitarians Are Better At Detecting Inequality — But Only When It Affects Socially Disadvantaged Groups
By Emily Reynolds
There is ample evidence that inequality exists — in the UK alone, one study suggested, the richest 1% have a quarter of the country’s wealth, and marginalised groups experience inequality in relation to work, education, living standards, healthcare and more.
However, not everyone is attentive to inequality. While some are keenly focused on its causes and its solutions, others believe it’s simply not important, or at the very least that it’s exaggerated. So what determines whether we pay attention to inequality?
A new study, published in PNAS, argues that our ideological stance on equalit...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 21, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Social Source Type: blogs
Do Girls Really Show More Empathy Than Boys?
By Emma Young
Three people are walking down the street, two women and one man. One of the women trips and falls. Which of the two observers will feel more empathy for her pain? Hundreds of studies suggest that it’ll be the woman. However, these results almost overwhelmingly come from self-reports. Objective evidence that women genuinely feel more empathy than men is very thin on the ground. This has led to the idea that women report more empathy not because they actually feel it but to conform to societal expectations that they should. However, a new study in Scientific Reports claims to provide evidence that, even w...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 19, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Developmental Gender Social Source Type: blogs
Episode 25: How To Change Your Personality
This is Episode 25 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology. Download here
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/psychcrunch/20210513_PsychCrunch_Ep25.mp3
Are our personalities set in stone, or can we choose to change them? In this bonus episode, Matthew Warren talks to former Research Digest editor Christian Jarrett about his new book Be Who You Want: Unlocking the Science of Personality Change. Christian discusses the evidence-based methods you can use to alter your personality, whether you’re an introvert who wants to become the...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 18, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Personality Podcast Source Type: blogs
Food Tastes Better If You Look At It Before You Smell It
By Emily Reynolds
Smell is often considered to be a particularly evocative sense: if you haven’t yourself been transported back in time by a nostalgic scent then you’ll almost certainly be familiar with the phenomenon via reference to the famous Proustian rush. Scent is also increasingly being used in marketing, with some evidence suggesting that smell can influence consumers’ judgements and decisions.
A new study, published in the Journal for Consumer Psychology, takes a closer look at how smell interacts with other senses to influence our perceptions. The team, led by the University of South Florida’s Dipa...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 17, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Eating Smell Source Type: blogs
Moral Panics And Poor Sleep: The Week ’s Best Psychology Links
Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web
A neural implant has allowed a paralysed individual to type by imagining writing letters. The implant of 200 electrodes in the premotor cortex picks up on the person’s intentions to perform the movements associated with writing a given letter, translating these into a character on a screen. The individual was able to type 90 characters per minute with minimal errors, reports John Timmer at Ars Technica.
Robin Dunbar famously estimated that humans are limited to having around 150 friends, due to cognitive restrictions imposed by th...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 14, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs
Stressful Days At Work Leave Us Less Likely To Exercise
By Emily Reynolds
After an incredibly stressful day of work, which are you more likely to do: walk several miles home, or get on a bus straight to your door? While the first option certainly comes with increased health benefits — including, potentially, decreased stress — many of us would choose the second anyway.
A new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, seeks to understand why, even when we know how positive exercise can be, we often fail to be active after work. It could come down to how high-pressure your job is, according to Sascha Abdel Hadi from Justus-Liebig-University Gi...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - May 13, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Occupational Sport Source Type: blogs
