Science of the SpiritS


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Study: Racial stereotyping linked to creative stagnation


Science Daily
Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:53 UTC
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© Credit: Flickr Creative Commons
New research suggests that racial stereotypes and creativity have more in common than we might think.

In an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University and colleagues find that racial stereotyping and creative stagnation share a common mechanism: categorical thinking.

"Although these two concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when people fixate on existing category information and conventional mindsets," Tadmor and her colleagues write.

The researchers examined whether there might be a causal relationship between racial essentialism -- the view that racial groups possess underlying essences that represent deep-rooted, unalterable traits and abilities -- and creativity.
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Hearts

Mapping the emotions we don't have language for

Emily Elert
Popular Science
Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:33 UTC
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That sort of painful, sort of bittersweet, sort of wistful feeling you get looking out the window or driving at night or listening to a far-off train whistle? There's a word for that in Japanese.

Few of us use all--or even most--of the 3,000 English-language words available to us for describing our emotions, but even if we did, most of us would still experience feelings for which there are, apparently, no words.

In some cases, though, words do exist to describe those nameless emotions--they're just not English words. Which is a shame, because--as today's infographic by design student Pei-Ying Lin demonstrates, they often define a feeling entirely familiar to us.

Lin solicited the list of "unspeakable" words from colleagues at London's Royal College of Art, and found that their definitions in English usually came down to something like, "it is a kind of (emotion A), close to (emotion B), and somehow between (emotion C) and (emotion D)."
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We may all be psychic: Data from 14-year Global Consciousness Study released

Greg Newkirk
Who Forted
Sun, 06 Jan 2013 20:52 UTC
Roger Nelson
© Who Forted
The original title of this post was going to "Highly Significant Data of 14 Year Global Consciousness Study Shows Evidence of Synchronicity", but that was kind of a mouthful. Besides, I actually wanted people to read this, because the results of this study can't really be understated: there is "highly significant" evidence that we may all be psychically linked.

Researchers for the Global Consciousness Study just released their data collected from August 1998 to this, the first month of 2013, and their findings, while nowhere near complete, show hugely significant evidence that we all may be far more connected than we think. The data (which can be read here), might be a little intimidating to make sense of at first, but here's the basic gist of how it all works and what it all means:

14 years ago the creators of the Global Consciousness Project began placing random number generators all across the world. They call these generators "eggs". As of now, there are around 60 of these eggs located in Europe, the US, Canada, India, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, Africa, Thailand, South America, and Australia. The purpose of these eggs is to constantly spit out random numbers. Meanwhile, devices are also spitting out "guesses" to what those random numbers could be. They call this the "expected randomness" and they're figured using some crazy math I couldn't possibly understand. The researchers then measure how often the random numbers and the guesses match.
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Five universal personality traits? Not always

Emily Sohn
Discovery News
Mon, 07 Jan 2013 07:41 UTC
Bolivian Woman
© iStockPhotoAn elderly woman from the lowlands in Boliva.
In recent years, psychologists have zeroed in on five big personality traits that appear to be universal.

No matter what culture people come from, a number of studies have suggested, everyone incorporates some degree of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

But after considering the indigenous and mostly illiterate Tsimane forager - horticulturalists of Bolivia, researchers are challenging the idea of the "Big Five." Instead, they argue that the Tsimane have just two main personality traits: socially beneficial behavior and industriousness.

The findings call into question the universality of human personality traits. Instead, the specific demands of various societies may affect which quirks of character become most significant to different groups of people.

"Individuals in all human societies face similar goals of learning important productive skills, avoiding environmental dangers, cooperating and competing effectively in social encounters, and finding suitable mates," the researchers wrote in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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Life Preserver

Self-control instantly replenished by self-affirmation

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:55 UTC
approve
© PsyBlog
When you feel weak, stating core values can be a quick and easy self-control booster.

People are rightly obsessed with self-control because they intuitively understand what studies have proven: that it is associated with all sorts of positive outcomes in life, like satisfying relationships and academic achievement.

Failures of self-control, however, have been linked with addiction, overeating, interpersonal conflict and underachievement.

Self-control can be hard to maintain, as most of us know to our cost. One study has found that exercising self-control is such hard work, it measurably depletes our glucose levels (Gailliot et al., 2007). The same study also found that having a glass of lemonade afterwards can restore us to full power.

But not everyone appreciates the calories gained from a sugary drink or wants to wait while it is digested, so what other, quicker methods are there?
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Life Preserver

10 step guide for making your New Year's resolutions

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Tue, 31 Dec 2013 11:21 UTC
list
© PsyBlog
Are you tortoise or hare? For New Year's resolutions it pays to go slow and make sure you get there.

One of the main reasons that New Year's resolutions are so often forgotten before January is out is that they frequently require habit change.

And habits, without the right techniques, are highly resistant to change, as I explain in my new book 'Making Habits, Breaking Habits'.

But because habits work unconsciously and automatically, we can tap into our in-built autopilot to get the changes we want.

So here is my quick ten-step guide to making those New Year's resolutions, based on the hundreds of psychology studies I cover in the book.
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Magic Wand

Seeking seat of consciousness in dark side of brain

Kelly Crowe
CBC News
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:13 UTC


The brain may be most active when doing nothing at all.

Imagine a human brain sitting in a chair, laughing at our clumsy attempts to figure out how it works. It's an image that comes to neuroscientist Dr. Georg Northoff, as he writes books and plays about the brain, when he's not busy investigating its neural mysteries.

"I always imagine when I do these plays, there sits a brain beside us, and I'm sure the brain would smile and say 'they're so stupid,' " he said.

It's a pretty cheeky attitude for a mass of neural tissue Northoff describes as 'pulp.'

"You'll see in my play, I describe it as 'gruesome grey pulp.' If you consider the brain from the outside, if you just take it out of the skull, it's just grey, jelly matter," he said. "Inside the brain, it's a collection of neurons, a collection of molecules...I would argue it is some spatial, structural, temporal template which is continuously changing, like a grid. I hope that in 10 years, I can tell you more."

Northoff holds the Canada Research Chair in Neuropsychiatry at the University of Ottawa and he's also part of the Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Unit at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. As he studies the biochemical basis of mental illness, Northoff believes he's also on the trail of the elusive seat of consciousness, the part of the brain that creates our unique sense of self.
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People

'Universal' personality traits don't necessarily apply to isolated indigenous people

Audrey Hamilton
American Psychological Association
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 09:56 UTC
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© Unknown
Study of farmer-foragers raises doubt about application of popular personality model.

Five personality traits widely thought to be universal across cultures might not be, according to a study of an isolated Bolivian society.

Researchers who spent two years looking at 1,062 members of the Tsimane culture found that they didn't necessarily exhibit the five broad dimensions of personality - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism - also known as the "Big Five." The American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published the study online Dec. 17.

While previous research has found strong support for the Big Five traits in more developed countries and across some cultures, these researchers discovered more evidence of a Tsimane "Big Two:" socially beneficial behavior, also known as prosociality, and industriousness. These Big Two combine elements of the traditional Big Five, and may represent unique aspects of highly social, subsistence societies.

"Similar to the conscientiousness portion of the Big Five, several traits that bundle together among the Tsimane included efficiency, perseverance and thoroughness. These traits reflect the industriousness of a society of subsistence farmers," said the study's lead author, Michael Gurven, PhD, of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "However, other industrious traits included being energetic, relaxed and helpful. In small-scale societies, individuals have fewer choices for social or sexual partners and limited domains of opportunities for cultural success and proficiency. This may require abilities that link aspects of different traits, resulting in a trait structure other than the Big Five."
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Question

Senator claims angels visited him in hospital

Marc Lallanilla
Life's Little Mysteries
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:53 UTC
Senator Mark Kirk
© Bill Zars/Daily Herald, Chicago

U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk says relearning to walk was a frustrating, exhausting process that came with a breakthrough moment.
Illinois Senator Mark Kirk has wrestled with lots of devilish political issues during his 28-year political career, but after suffering a stroke one year ago, he claims he had a very different experience: an encounter with angels.

The Republican senator was recovering from a massive stroke in the right side of his brain at Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Intensive Care Unit in Chicago when Kirk said three angels visited him, the Chicago area's Daily Herald reported.

Standing at the foot of his hospital bed, the angels, Kirk said, asked him, "You want to come with us?"

"No," Kirk said he told them matter-of-factly. "I'll hold off."

Kirk, 53, has spent the past year undergoing intensive therapy to help him regain his ability to walk and perform other basic functions. Kirk's mind, according to his surgeon Dr. Richard Fessler, is still very active. "His thought process is normal, and his mental state remains sharp," Fessler told the Daily Herald.

Kirk now joins an estimated 8 million Americans who claim to have received celestial visitors or had some other type of near-death experience (NDE): The congressman sensed he was close to death in the days following his stroke. "A thing goes off in your head that this is the end," Kirk told the Daily Herald.
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Your elusive future self

Greg Miller
ScienceNow
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:10 UTC
Your Future Self
© Joshua Lott/ReutersWill you love her forever? A new study suggests that people’s tastes change more than they think they will.
Are you going to love Taylor Swift just as much in 10 years as you do now? Sure, you might think, I'll be basically the same person then, with roughly the same preferences, values, and personality traits. But you're probably wrong, according to a new study, whose authors claim that many people underestimate how much they'll change in the future.

From picking a job to selecting a spouse, we face many decisions that will affect our lives far into the future. Those choices rest on some assumptions, notes Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University. "Any kind of lifetime commitment is based on your belief that you know the person you're going to be in 10 years."

To investigate people's predictions about their future selves, Gilbert teamed up with Harvard postdoctoral fellow Jordi Quoidbach and Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The trio devised a series of online experiments in which a total of more than 19,000 people participated. In one, adults between ages 18 and 68 filled out a questionnaire, scoring themselves on basic personality traits such as extraversion, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences.

Then the researchers asked them to do it all again, this time answering either as they would have 10 years ago, or as they thought they would 10 years in the future. The surveys from participants of all ages indicated that on average people felt they had changed more in the past decade than they would in the next, the researchers report online today in Science.
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