On April 13, 1944, thousands of people clashed with police on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago. The melee was unrelated to U.S. participation in World War II, labor unrest or President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s controversial move to seize control of local Chicago industries. Rather, a massive, impatient art crowd overwhelmed the museum’s...
Advocates for the use of trigger warnings suggest that they can help people avoid or emotionally prepare for encountering content related to a past trauma. But trigger warnings may not fulfill either of these functions, according to an analysis published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Instead, warnings appear to heighten the anticipatory...
Many people fail at achieving their early career dreams. But a new study suggests that those failures don’t have to harm your self-esteem if you think about them in the right way. Researchers found that people who viewed career goal failures as a steppingstone to new opportunities never lost self-esteem, no matter how many times...
Opposites don’t actually attract. That’s the takeaway from a sweeping CU Boulder analysis of more than 130 traits and including millions of couples over more than a century. “Our findings demonstrate that birds of a feather are indeed more likely to flock together,” said first author Tanya Horwitz, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology...
Gratitude is a strong emotion, usually felt by a person who benefits from an intentional good deed of another person. Receiving gifts or benefits can instill a feeling of gratitude in people who receive them, i.e., beneficiaries, encouraging them to be more prosocial, while also helping to create a bond with their benefactors. This has...
Leticia Santiago carries her ancestral heritage wherever she goes. Every time she addresses the crowds during the Guelaguetza, the biggest cultural event in southwestern Mexico, her words, her garments and her skin reveal a clue about the town where she was proudly born. The 35-year-old Mexican was elected as Centéotl goddess in late June, which...
Encouraging Latinx adolescents of Mexican origin to embrace their ethnic pride, cultural values, and connections to their cultural community contributes to positive development and better adjustment during adolescence, a new University of California, Davis, psychology study suggests. Moreover, researchers said, cultural preservation can help Latinx youth cope with adverse life experiences and social threats such...
New research has shown that having positive contact with people from diverse groups can reduce the development of harmful intergroup conspiracy beliefs. Experts from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology, in collaboration with the University of East Anglia, found that among British participants, positive intergroup contact interfered with the development of conspiracy theories about...
Putting truth to the test in the “post-truth era”, Boston College psychologists conducted experiments that show when Americans decide whether a claim of fact should qualify as true or false, they consider the intentions of the information source, the team reported recently in Nature’s Scientific Reports. That confidence is based on what individuals think the source...
For better or worse, much of life is categorized along gendered lines: Clothing stores have sections for men and women, certain foods are considered more manly or more feminine, and even drinks can take on a gendered sheen (“manmosa,” anyone?). Our newly published research finds that even social media is a canvas for rigid gender...
