Psychology in Action

Author: Stephanie Vezich

  • I’ll take one Lassie, no wait…make that an Air Bud

    I’ll take one Lassie, no wait…make that an Air Bud

    A study published in PLOS ONE looked at 100 films that featured a dog as a main character from 1939 to 2003 along with the number of registrations with the American Kennel Club by breed in the 10 years before and after each film

  • New paper by UCLA alums highlights emerging trend in cognitive neuroscience

    New paper by UCLA alums highlights emerging trend in cognitive neuroscience

    Psychologists aim to better understand the link between internal and external states, that is, between cognitions and behaviors. Behaviors are often clear enough to measure, but accurately capturing the essence of a cognition can be a much fuzzier task. For instance, suppose you were interested in the relationship between how much someone enjoys rewards (reward…

  • Bossing stress away

    Imagining the stereotypical executive doesn’t exactly conjure up the image of a zen-like state. Instead, we tend to associate leadership roles with too many demands and not enough time to meet them—in essence, a pretty stressful lifestyle. After all, managers typically have to juggle more responsibilities and contend with more personalities than do their subordinates.…

  • An argument for the end of political ads?

    With election season coming up, the presidential candidates have invested heavily—recruiting top ad executives, media researchers, producers, etc.—in creating the perfect ads to highlight their own strengths and their opponents’ shortcomings. But how much does this effort really sway voters?

  • Finding the motivation to stick with goals

    Most of us have gotten loyalty cards at one point or another that treated us to a free item after a certain amount of purchases at that particular establishment. Most of us have also tossed more than one of those cards after realizing they weren’t worth the space in our wallets for the amount of…

  • Swing state neurons?

    In a tight election, attention immediately turns to swing voters. Poll analysts swarm them with a barrage of questions to predict which candidate may garner more of their crucial votes. In anticipation of the 2008 election, analysts went one step further and looked not only at swing voters’ survey responses but also their neural responses.

  • Is the way to a woman’s heart through her funny bone?

    Say what you will about the findings in evolutionary psychology—they certainly have good narratives. One of the latest, published in the July issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, uses sexual selection theory to argue that humor is important to men and women in heterosexual romantic contexts, albeit in different ways.

  • Red scare, quite literally

    The color red is commonly used to caution us. Used prominently in alerts ranging from stop signs to warning labels, we generally associate red with some kind of threat or danger. Some have even suggested that athletes whose team color is red dominate more than those with other team colors (although having been a Stanford…

  • Are you more of a conformist during flu season?

    Looking back on social psychology’s greatest hits, my mind always drifts first to studies on conformity, largely because they make such good stories. Take Asch, for instance. Who would’ve thought that so many people would willingly follow the crowd in giving a blatantly wrong answer about line length? And then, of course, there’s Milgram. It…

  • I got chills, they’re multiplying

    Many of us have experienced chills when listening to music, those weird, almost indescribable sensations sometimes likened to shivers down the spine. If you’re very meta, the line serving as this post’s title might even do it for you (but probably not—chills don’t tend to occur until later on in a song). Despite our inability…