03 Mar 2011  | 1 PM

[For more, visit the Communication Insight Center.] Hollywood stars, media mavens and America's most influential businessmen and politicians: that's the crowd at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner. That night in 2006 newly appointed Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke mingled with CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo, who asked about his recent congressional testimony, which had sent stock markets soaring. He told her he'd been misinterpreted, she reported the comments, and the markets plummeted, prompting a hail of criticism. Every senior leader, in politics or in ...

30 June 2011  | 6 PM

People often share stories, news, and information with the people around them. We forward online articles to our friends, share stories with our co-workers at the water cooler, and pass along rumors to our neighbors. Such social transmission has been going on for thousands of years, and the advent of social technologies like texting, Facebook, and other social media sites has only made it faster and easier to share content with others. But why is certain content shared more than others and what drives people to share? read ...

15 Dec 2011  | 03:32 AM

Researchers from the University of Bristol have discovered that a chemical compound in the brain can weaken the synaptic connections between neurons in a region of the brain important for the formation of long-term memories. The findings, published December 13 in the Journal of Neuroscience, may also provide a potential explanation for the loss of memory associated with Alzheimer's. read

21 June 2011  | 06:03 AM

whose findings were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study found that a man could make himself more desirable to women by choosing to buy a “flashy” luxury product, such as a Porsche, rather than a more mundane one

21 Nov 2011  | 2 PM

A correspondent writes: I just want to spend a few words to point you to this book I have just found on Amazon: “Understanding The New Statistics: Effect Sizes, Confidence Intervals, and Meta-Analysis” by G. Cumming. I have been attracted by the rather unusual and ‘sexy’ title but it seems to be nothing more than an attempt at alerting the psychology community on considering point estimation procedures and confidence intervals, in place of hypothesis testing, the latter being ‘a terrible idea!’ in the author’s own words. Some more quotes here. Then ...

26 Aug 2011  | 3 PM

Turns out some of them may be dead wrong: Three articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their

24 Aug 2011  | 12:26 AM

Source: "Initiating Salary Discussions With an Extreme Request: Anchoring Effects on Initial Salary Offers" from Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Volume 41, Issue 7, pages 1774–1792, July 2011 So next time you negotiate, maybe it's a good idea to

18 Aug 2011  | 03:33 AM

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Kansas plan to bring a highly successful anti-bullying effort, the KiVa program, to American schools. Starting as early as the 2012-13 school year, a pilot program could kick off in selected classrooms in Lawrence, Kan. If shown to be successful there, soon afterward the model could expand nationally. read

07 Sep 2011  | 00:28 AM

A study carried out by Dr Nasson Munyandamutsa, a Rwandan psychiatrist and his team, has revealed that close to one third of the Rwandan population (ranging from 24 to 28 percent) suffer from various levels of trauma. This was disclosed during a two-day

23 Jan 2012  | 11:32 AM

One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that Outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should. After all, in the context of a happy life, a messy desk or house is a trivial problem — yet I’ve found, and other people tell me they feel the same way, that getting control of the stuff of life makes me feel more in control of my life generally. (Even if this is an illusion, it’s a helpful illusion.) But as much as most of us want to keep our home, office, car, ...