Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to co-author Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, society relies on incentives, in the form of rewards and punishments, to encourage people to conform to certain standards of behavior. "Economists and even psychologists haven't been paying much attention to the fact that small changes in our environment can have dramatic effects on behavior. We underemphasize these subtle environmental cues," he says...
...rather the smell of citrus; that is, people may have behaved better because they smelled something they liked, rather than something "clean." "It could be simply that a positive smell creates a positive mood, which encourages positive behavior. You cannot conclude it is cleanliness per se," says Brown University psychologist Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire. To rule out the confounding factor of good smells, she says, the study's authors could have added a third room to the experiment scented with recently baked chocolate chip cookies, for example...
...fart spray is a commercially available product. Incidentally, according to a psychologist who has worked with it in experiments, it is nearly impossible to rid upholstery of it. Citrus-scented Windex certainly makes for a nicer lab environment, which perhaps has something to do with Liljenquist's continued interest in this line of study. "Research on how to stay on the moral high ground and promote virtue," she says, "is something I find refreshing...
...society is producing ever more overinformed, overanxious and overprotective parents, blamed for causing or exacerbating all sorts of problems in their children, from learning disabilities to teenage anorexia. "If you don't let your child discover the world, it can do real harm," says Henriette Felici-Bach, a child psychologist in Paris. "In these cases, the parent must be cured as well. If a mother is acting this way, it is because she is not well, she fears something that does not exist...
...course, you can train yourself to be optimistic through sheer mental discipline. Ever since psychologist Martin Seligman crafted the phrase "learned optimism" in 1991 and started offering optimism training, there's been a thriving industry in the kind of thought reform that supposedly overcomes negative thinking. You can buy any number of books and DVDs with titles like Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, in which you will learn mental exercises to reprogram your outlook from gray to the rosiest pink: "affirmations," for example, in which you repeat upbeat predictions over and over to yourself; "visualizations" in which you post...