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You told me that already! Why we're so poor at remembering to whom we told what

BPS Research Digest -- It can take some bottle to share an anecdote, so it's somewhat harsh when your friend shoots you down with an impatient accusation that you've told them this story before. You'd think they'd be more understanding - most of us seem to be far better at remembering who's told us what compared with to whom we've told what. Psychologists characterise this as a distinction between "source memory" and "d...     11-24
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An unwanted kiss from a moral man. Still feeling dirty?

BPS Research Digest -- We know that physical sullying, immorality and shame can all be associated with feelings of literal and mental dirtiness, but it's not entirely clear how all these things interact. For example, for a heterosexual woman, which is worse: having a kiss forced on you by an otherwise moral man, or having a consensual kiss with an immoral man? Corinna Elliott and Adam Radomsky have investigated and they...     11-23
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Want to predict a footie result? Don't even think about it

BPS Research Digest -- Imagine you've just paid an expert good money for their verdict and they say to you: "Can you hang on a couple of minutes whilst I don't think about this". You'd be forgiven for thinking they've gone silly. They may have. But another possibility is that you've chosen a shrewd expert who's totally up-to-speed with the latest decision-making research: Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues have just sho...     11-19
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How infants affect how much their carers engage with them

BPS Research Digest -- Young children benefit socially and intellectually the more their carers engage and respond to them. Recognising this, we can train nursery staff to be as responsive to the children in their care as possible. But a new study by Claire Vallotton raises an interesting and under-examined issue - what if there's something about some infants that leads their carers to engage with them more, thus giving...     11-18
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Testosterone-status mismatch in a group is linked with reduced collective confidence

BPS Research Digest -- Men and women with more testosterone like to be in charge. Indeed, they can find it stressful and uncomfortable when denied the status that they crave. Similarly, people low in testosterone find it uncomfortable to be placed in positions of authority. An intriguing new study has built on these earlier findings, showing a mismatch between testosterone-level and status can have an effect on group fu...     11-17
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Patients with empathic, attentive doctors recover more quickly from the common cold

BPS Research Digest -- The amount of empathy and attentiveness shown by doctors to their patients really does matter. David Rakel and colleagues have found that patients who rate their doctor as highly empathic recover more quickly from a cold. Their illness is shortened by about a day - the same effect shown by the most promising anti-viral drugs. But a doctor's empathy, unlike the anti-viral, doesn't trigger nausea an...     11-14
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Brands leave their mark on children's brains

BPS Research Digest -- The idea may be "unpalatable", but companies seeking an edge over their rivals should ensure that children are exposed to their brands as early in life as possible. That's according to Andrew Ellis and colleagues, whose new research shows that the classic "age-of-acquisition" effect in psychology applies to brand names as much as it does to everyday words.Ellis's team found that student participan...     11-12
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Ten statisticians every psychologist should know about

BPS Research Digest -- As psychology students past and present will be only too aware, statistics are a key part of every psychology undergrad course and they also appear in nearly every published journal article. And yet have we ever stopped to recognise the statisticians who have brought us these wonderful mathematical tools? As psychologist Daniel Wright puts it: "Statistical techniques are often taught as if they we...     11-11
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Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity

BPS Research Digest -- There have been prior clues that creativity benefits from ample cross-talk between the brain hemispheres. For example, patients who've had a commissurotomy - the severing of the thick bundle of nerve fibres that joins the two hemispheres - show deficits on creative tasks. Now Elizabeth Shobe and colleagues have provided the first evidence that creativity is boosted by an intervention designed to i...     11-09
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How to increase altruism in toddlers

BPS Research Digest -- Surely one of the most charming sights is of an adult struggling to reach an object, only for a toddler to pick up that object and hand it to the adult, as research has shown they so often will. Psychologists think such ingrained altruism has evolved as a consequence of our species' dependence on group living for survival. Supporting this account, Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter have shown that...     11-05
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CCTV cameras don't reassure, they frighten

BPS Research Digest -- People are no more fearful of crossing a street with a young male skinhead in it than they are a street with a smartly dressed woman present, unless, that is, a CCTV camera is overhead. The new finding appears to undermine one of the key justifications for Britain's network of 4.2 million surveillance cameras: that they provide reassurance to the public. It seems that the sight of a CCTV camera ca...     11-04
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Facial emotional expressions are universal and culturally specific

BPS Research Digest -- Earlier this year a piece of emotion research provoked a rather heated reaction in some quarters after it claimed to show that, contrary to the writings of Charles Darwin, Paul Ekman and others, facial emotional expressions are not universal after all. "Seriously, is this all that it takes to be published in Current Biology? Sheesh," was the verdict of one incredulous online commenter to Reddit (a...     11-02
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Spontaneous panic attack caught on brain imaging scan

BPS Research Digest -- Researchers from Germany, Scotland and Switzerland have notched up a brain imaging first by capturing a participant in the full throes of a spontaneous panic attack, whilst also having a concurrent recording of her heart rate. Kai Spiegelhalder and colleagues were able to use the woman's elevated heart rate to provide an objective marker for the course of her panic attack. The 59-year-old was unme...     10-30
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What happens to neurology patients with symptoms "unexplained"?

BPS Research Digest -- To be told that your symptoms have no identifiable physical cause can be at once both a relief and a curse. In one sense the doctor is giving you a clean bill of health. But there's the chance they have made a mistake. What's more, if the symptoms persist without explanation, you face the stigma and frustration of people suspecting your problems are "merely" psychological or, worse still, made up....     10-28
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Young children's moral understanding more sophisticated than previously thought

BPS Research Digest -- When her Daily Mail column about Stephen Gately's death provoked an avalanche of complaints, the disgraced Jan Moir issued a press statement in which she said "it was never [her] intention" to upset people. Defensively speaking, Moir's choice of words was astute. In judging moral responsibility, we adults focus almost exclusively on intention rather than outcome. Stated starkly, the person who del...     10-26
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Free access to PsyPress articles covered by Digest

BPS Research Digest -- Psychology Press have just told Digest that from now on they're going to give away temporary free access to any of their articles that we report on. I'll make sure from today that I indicate when a research paper is published by PsyPress so that you can look out for the free access (it may take a few days to come through). For the next week or so, you can gain free access to these articles recentl...     10-24
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A warm room makes people feel socially closer

BPS Research Digest -- Last year, the psychologists Lawrence Williams and John Bargh gave participants a cup of coffee to hold and showed that the temperature of the coffee affected the way those participants rated a stranger's character. A hot coffee led them to rate him as more good natured and generous, whilst holding an iced coffee had the opposite effect. The finding was touted as an example of embodied cognition -...     10-23
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Psychology X-factor

BPS Research Digest -- Last time around it was a tie. You voted joint first: the study on increasing altruism in toddlers and the study showing that CCTV cameras don't reassure, they frighten.Which was your favourite from our last seven reports:Click Here for PollOnline Survey | Website Polls | Email Marketing | Crowdsourcing SoftwareView MicroPoll     10-23
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Young girls particularly prone to getting stuck in role of bullying victim

BPS Research Digest -- Young girls are far more prone than boys to getting stuck in the role of bullying victim. That's according to a new investigation by psychologists who studied hundreds of children at 17 primary schools in Hertfordshire and North London.Dieter Wolke and his colleagues interviewed the children when they were aged between six and nine years and then surveyed them again two or four years later once th...     10-22
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Competition between nostrils

BPS Research Digest -- Show one image exclusively to one eye and a different image exclusively to the other eye and rather than experiencing a merging of the images, an observer's percept will flit backwards and forwards randomly and endlessly between the two. This "binocular rivalry", as it's known, has been of particular interest to psychologists because it shows how the same incoming sensory information can give rise...     10-21
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