2013 PLMS Conference – Save the Date!
On April 13, 2013 the Project on Law and Mind Sciences and the National Lawyers Guild are co-hosting a conference titled “Deep Capture: Psychology, Public Relations, Democracy, and Law” at Harvard Law School. Please save the date. You won’t want to miss it. More details to be announced soon. (Source: The Situationist)
Source: The Situationist - March 23, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Deep Capture Events Source Type: blogs
Dive into Drunk Tank Pink Today!
NYU professor Adam Alter’s new book, Drunk Tank Pink, is out today!
As I mentioned in a post last week, we are trying out a new feature here at The Situationist of interviewing authors about their books and we’ll be publishing the interview with Adam in a few days.
In anticipation of that, here is one of Adam’s interesting recent papers, Fondness makes the distance grow shorter: Desired locations seem closer because they seem more vivid:
Do appealing locations seem nearer than unappealing locations merely because they are more desirable? We examine the possibility that people represent desirable locations...
Source: The Situationist - March 21, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Adam Benforado Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Mindfulness, Adolescence, and Depression
From ScienceDaily:
Secondary school students who follow an in-class mindfulness programme report reduced indications of depression, anxiety and stress up to six months later. Moreover, these students were less likely to develop pronounced depression-like symptoms. The study, conducted by Professor Filip Raes (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven), is the first to examine mindfulness in a large sample of adolescents in a school-based setting.
Mindfulness is a form of meditation therapy focused on exercising ‘attentiveness’. Depression is often rooted in a downward spiral of negative feelings...
Source: The Situationist - March 19, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Positive Psychology Source Type: blogs
Blind Spot
From the Harvard Gazette (an article about Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji’s extroardinary new book, co-authored with Anthony Greenwald):
Mahzarin Banaji shouldn’t have been biased against women. A leading social psychologist — who rose from unlikely circumstances in her native India, where she once dreamed of becoming a secretary — she knew better than most that women were just as cut out for the working world as men.
Then Banaji sat down to take a test. Names of men and women and words associated with “career” and “family” flashed across the computer screen, one after the other. As she tried ...
Source: The Situationist - March 3, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Book Ideology Implicit Associations Situationist Contributors Source Type: blogs
Ryan Enos – SALMS Talk
SALMS hosted Ryan Enos at Harvard Law School on October 11, 2012, for a talk entitled “Mitt Romney Is Really, Really Good Looking: Do Attractiveness and Other Trivial Things Affect Elections?” The talk was part of the Mind Sciences & the Election series, which was cosponsored by American Constitution Society, HLS Republicans, HLS Democrats, and the Black Law Students Association. Click the link below to watch the video – enjoy!
Ryan Enos video
Related Situationist posts:
Obama Emphasizes Situation: Romney Emphasizes Disposition
Dr. Ryan Enos at HLS on the Role of Trivial Things on Elections
The Facial Situat...
Source: The Situationist - March 1, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Ideology Implicit Associations Politics SALMS Video Source Type: blogs
The Gendered Situation of Smiling
By Soledad de Lemus, Russell Spears, & Miguel Moya wrote a terrific post on SPSP Blog about the mystery and meaning of the smile. Here are some excerpts:
We smile when we feel happy, but smiles are more than just the outward display of an inner emotion. We are far more likely to smile when we are with other people because a smile is a message: just one more way for people to communicate information to and establish social ties with other people.
A smile, though, sometimes means more than just “I am happy.” Just as many species bare their teeth to signal their dominance and rank, smiles exchanged among humans s...
Source: The Situationist - February 27, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Embodied Cognition Emotions Evolutionary Psychology Life Source Type: blogs
Gender, Weight, Stereotypes, and Prejudice
From Slate:
This month a team of Yale psychologists released a study indicating that male jurors—but not female jurors—were more likely to hand a guilty verdict to obese women than to slender women. The researchers corralled a group of 471 pretend peers of varying body sizes and described to them a case of check fraud. They also presented them with one of four images—either a large guy, a lean guy, a large woman, or a lean woman—and identified the person in the photograph as the defendant. Participants rated the pretend-defendant’s guilt on a five-point scale. No fat bias emerged when the female pretend peers ev...
Source: The Situationist - February 25, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Implicit Associations Law Source Type: blogs
The Implicit Party of “Independent” Voters
This post, written by Carlee Beth Hawkins about her work with Situationist Contributor Brian Nosek, was recently published on the SPSP Blog.
Voters sometimes cross party lines, but not very often: In U.S. elections, for example, people who label themselves Democrats usually vote for the Democratic candidate and Republicans vote Republican. The recent 2012 election illustrated the power of political affiliation: the Republican candidate Governor Mitt Romney won Wyoming, where Republicans far outnumber Democrats, but President Obama won in places like Vermont, where Democrats are more plentiful than Republicans.
Given...
Source: The Situationist - February 22, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Altruism Ideology Implicit Associations Situationist Contributors Source Type: blogs
Recent Research on Well-Being, Giving, Getting, and Gratitude
From SPSP Press Release:
Giving away money to feel wealthy
New research shows that people all around the world – from Canada to Uganda, from South Africa to India – derive more happiness from spending money on others than they do on themselves.
For the first time, we show that giving away money or spending it on others confers the ironic psychological benefit of increasing the giver’s sense of wealth,” says Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and co-author with Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia of the upcoming book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending. In a suite of new, not-yet pub...
Source: The Situationist - February 20, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Altruism Distribution Emotions Positive Psychology Source Type: blogs
Unconscious Processing Can Improve Decision-Making
This study provides some of the first clues for how our brains process this information for effective problem-solving and decision-making.”
Bursley (DC’12), who joined CMU’s Health and Human Performance Laboratory as a freshman, spent his undergraduate career working on this research and related studies. To support his work, he received a Small Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) and Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). Bursley also received a Rothberg Research Award in Human Brain Imaging, made possible by Carnegie Mellon alumnus and trustee Jonathan M. Rothberg (E’85), founder of four genetics com...
Source: The Situationist - February 18, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Choice Myth Neuroscience Video Source Type: blogs
Stereotype Threat for Boys
From Eureka Alert:
Negative stereotypes about boys may hinder their achievement, while assuring them that girls and boys are equally academic may help them achieve. From a very young age, children think boys are academically inferior to girls, and they believe adults think so, too. Even at these very young ages, boys’ performance on an academic task is affected by messages that suggest that girls will do better than they will.
Those are the conclusions of new research published in the journal Child Development and conducted at the University of Kent. The research sought to determine the causes of boys’ underach...
Source: The Situationist - February 17, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Implicit Associations Social Psychology Source Type: blogs
Mahzarin Banaji on The Cycle
Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji discusses her fantastic new book, Blind Spot, on the MSNBC show, The Cycle.
Related Situationist posts:
Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji Speaks at HLS
Mahzarin Banaji on B.F. Skinner
Mahzarin Banaji at Harvard Law School
Mahzarin Banaji’s Situation
The Situation of a Situationist – Mahzarin Banaji
Banaji & Greenwald on Edge – Part V
Firstiness
Go to Project Implicit here. Take the Policy IAT here.
To review all of the previous Situationist posts discussing implicit associations click on the “Implicit Associations” category in the right margin, or...
Source: The Situationist - February 14, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Ideology Implicit Associations Situationist Contributors Video Source Type: blogs
HLS SALMS – Officer Selection
HLS students, if you’re interested in the work of SALMS and want to be more involved over the next year, the current SALMS board will be selecting new officers this month. To apply, please send us your responses to the following:
1) Name, class year
2) Position(s) applying for (President, VP/Treasurer, Speakers Chair, Communications Chair)
3) Paragraph on why you are interested in and qualified for this/these position/s
4) Description of your past involvement with SALMS
5) What you would like to see SALMS do in the future
Please send your application to rmatte[at]jd14.law.harvard.edu (replace “[at]” with ...
Source: The Situationist - February 12, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: SALMS Source Type: blogs
