Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

A new look at why women opt out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics careers.

What explains the appeal of Oscar-nominated movies? 'Younger opposite-gender leading stars, older directors, and unfamiliar temporal settings contribute to favorable evaluations' of these films,' a new study finds, '...thereby supporting the hypotheses of romantic attraction as a source of star power; reverence toward more mature directors; and an eagerness to escape from ordinary life, respectively'.

Arguments against Chomsky's Universal Grammar - 'language has been shaped to fit the brain, a process of cultural evolution,' the authors say.

Men with a stronger hand grip are more thrill-seeking.

Inter-brain synchronization during social interaction.

How women's mate preferences vary according to context.

More evidence that memory impairment can interfere with thinking about the future, this time in the case of developmental amnesia.

Clients' reasons for terminating therapy.

Advice for mental health professionals on how to make ethical treatment decisions.

You've heard of the 'extreme male brain' theory of autism, what about psychosis as the manifestation of an 'extreme female brain'?

How does the experience of space flight alter astronauts' value systems?

Keep Your Goals To Yourself

(Photo Credit: Cristian V)

Keep Your Goals To Yourself is the title of the latest addition to the The Psychology Video Collection in which Derek Sivers presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve them.

You can watch this short but engaging psychology video via the following link.

Keep Your Goals To Yourself

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Keep Your Goals To Yourself

Grab it, bag it, bin it - a new approach to psychological problem solving

If something's troubling you, write it down, put it in an envelope and seal it. Doing so will help bring you psychological closure. Xiuping Li at NUS Business School asked 80 students to write about a recent decision they regretted. Half of them were then told to seal their written recollection in an envelope. Afterwards, the envelope students felt less negative about the event than control students who just handed in their recollection without an envelope. The finding was replicated with forty female students who were asked to write about a strong personal desire that hadn't been satisfied.

Two further experiments shed some light on the process. Sealing a disturbing news story in an envelope reduced the negative emotional impact of the story and reduced participants' memory of it. By contrast, sealing an unrelated piece of paper did not have these effects, thus showing that it's the act of containing the emotional material that's important, not the mere act of putting anything in an envelope.

Finally, sealing in an envelope a written recollection of a regretted event led participants to feel less negative about the event than simply paper-clipping the pages together - so it's not just the mere act of doing something to a written recollection, it is specifically enclosing that material that is beneficial. What's more, this final experiment showed that the link between enveloping the material and participants' feelings was entirely mediated by their having a greater sense of psychological closure.

'We have shown that the metaphorical act of enclosing and sealing influences the memory, in the sense that the recollection of the emotional details of an event becomes weaker,' the researchers said. 'An effective way to relieve distress may be for the distressed person to seal an object related to his or her emotions in a package.' The researchers added that future research should test whether the effect still occurs if someone else does the sealing of the material, and if participants are told the purpose of the exercise.
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Li X, Wei L, & Soman D (2010). Sealing the emotions genie: the effects of physical enclosure on psychological closure. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 21 (8), 1047-50 PMID: 20622143