Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...these claims are about as credible as a slicer-dicer infomercial. But others point to video-game research that suggests digital diversions have many advantages over similar analog training tools. "Video games are very integrative in nature. You have to multitask a lot," says Chandramallika Basak, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In the PC-based game Rise of Nations, on which Basak published a paper last year in Psychology and Aging, multitasking involves managing an empire with multiple cities and simultaneously defending one locale from attack while reviving the sinking economy of another...
...study, presented last year at the Cognitive Neuroscientist Society's annual meeting, psychologist and neuroscientist Helena Westerberg of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm compared the cognitive abilities of 45 young adults (average age 25) with those of 55 older adults (average age 65). She found that after five weeks of computerized training on tasks ranging from reproducing a series of light flashes to repeating digits in the opposite order that they were given, the older group was able to reach the same level of working memory, attention and reaction time that the younger group had at the outset. (Notably...
...been 10 years since University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman kick-started the field of Positive Psychology - the study of what makes people happy, what makes life fulfilling and the role of positive emotions in the human psyche. (Traditionally, of course, psychology has focused on the reverse: sadness, anxiety, anger, grief...
Early work by positive psychologists had established intriguing correlations between happiness or optimism and factors like wealth, marriage, health and longevity, but there was little in the way of rigorous science to explain these associations. Now that's beginning to change. At Carnegie Mellon, for instance, psychologist Sheldon Cohen has been exploring exactly how positive emotions affect the body. (This is the flip side of previous work by Cohen and others linking stress, Type-A behavior and negative emotions to lowered immunity, heart disease and shorter lifespan.) Cohen's research shows that people with a "positive emotional style" have better...
...Einstein, he won't think he's any smarter; he will probably just disbelieve your contradictory theory, hew more closely to his own self-assessment and, in the end, feel even dumber. In one fascinating 1990s experiment demonstrating this effect - called cognitive dissonance in official terms - a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write hard-hearted essays opposing funding for the disabled. When these participants were later told they were compassionate, they felt even worse about what they had written. (See how to prevent illness...