Featured series 
Tag: Psychology
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Nation & World
Muting the Mozart effect
Though it has been embraced by everyone from advocates for arts education to parents hoping to encourage their kids to stick with piano lessons, two new studies conducted by Harvard researchers show no effect of music training on the cognitive abilities of young children.
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Nation & World
Polly want a vocabulary?
Irene Pepperberg, best known for her work with an African grey parrot named Alex — whose intelligence was estimated as equal to that of a 6-year-old child — recently relocated her lab to Harvard, where she continues to explore the origins of intelligence by working with birds.
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Nation & World
Dirty deeds, deconstructed
New studies co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino find that, contrary to decades of accepted wisdom, cheating feels good.
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Nation & World
What’s in a face?
Using scans of the brain, Harvard researchers show that patterns of neural activity change when people look at black and white faces, and male and female faces.
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Nation & World
A higher plane
Research by scientists in Elizabeth Spelke’s lab suggests our innate understanding of abstract geometry has origins in the evolutionary past.
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Nation & World
Advancing science and technology
The National Science Foundation is awarding grants to create three new science and technology centers this year, with two of them based in Cambridge. The two multi-institutional grants total $45 million over five years.
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Nation & World
Biases that can blind us
Psychology Professor Mahzarin Banaji gave incoming members of Harvard’s Class of 2017 a tour of their own biases, helping to raise awareness that can help them avoid making decisions based on unconscious preferences.
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Nation & World
Daniel M. Wegner famous for ‘thought suppression’
Daniel M. Wegner, a pioneering social psychologist who helped to reveal the mysteries of human experience through his work on thought suppression, conscious will, and mind perception, died July 5 at age 65.
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Nation & World
Psychology professor wins Taube Award
H. Stephen Leff, an assistant professor of clinical psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has received the Carl Taube Award from the American Public Health Association.
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Nation & World
Mourning that vexes the future
In a new paper, Professor of Psychology Richard McNally and graduate student Don Robinaugh say that while people suffering from complicated grief — a syndrome marked by intense, debilitating emotional distress and yearning for a lost loved one — had difficulty envisioning specific events in their future, those problems disappeared when they were asked to…
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Nation & World
The nearness of you
In research described earlier this year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Elinor Amit, a College Fellow in psychology, along with two collaborators, Cheryl Wakslak and Yaacov Trope, showed that people increasingly prefer to communicate verbally (versus visually) with people who are distant (versus close) — socially, geographically, or temporally.
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Nation & World
Online learning: It’s different
By interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind-wandering decreased by half, note-taking tripled, and overall retention of the material improved, said Daniel Schacter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, and Karl Szpunar, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology.
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Nation & World
Q&A with Matthew Nock
Professor of Psychology Matthew Nock is the author of a new paper, co-authored with other Harvard faculty, which examines suicidal thoughts and behaviors among adolescents. In a recent conversation with the Gazette, Nock discussed his research, and the resources available at Harvard for students and others in the community.
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Nation & World
Peering into our blind spots
Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji and longtime collaborator Anthony Greenwald condense three decades of work on the unconscious mind in “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.”
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Nation & World
He wrote the book of love
A neurologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School ponders love and its complexities in his latest book, “What to Read on Love, Not Sex: Freud, Fiction, and the Articulation of Truth in Modern Psychological Science.”
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Nation & World
William Kaye Estes
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on November 6, 2012, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late William Kaye Estes, Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Professor Estes made pioneering contributions to many cognitive domains over a period spanning more than…
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Nation & World
Rapid acts of kindness
In a series of experiments, Harvard researchers found that people who make quick decisions act less selfishly than those who deliberate.
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Nation & World
Figuring out fairness
A new Harvard study suggests that children as young as 3 consider merit — a key part of more-advanced ideas of fairness — when distributing resources.
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Nation & World
Bringing the psych lab online
A team of researchers from Harvard and Wellesley College shows that data gathered from online volunteers can be just as good as data collected in the lab.
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Nation & World
A story that doesn’t hold up
A study conducted by Professor of Psychology Richard J. McNally and colleagues from the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam is casting doubt on the “amnesia barrier” that has long been a hallmark of multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, by demonstrating that patients have knowledge of their other identities.
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Nation & World
A fresh look at mental illness
In a paper published in Neuron, Joshua Buckholtz and co-author Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg identify a biological reason for why many mental disorders share similar symptoms, a situation that makes diagnosis challenging.
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Nation & World
Decision, decisions
Two of Harvard’s leading social scientists discussed the way that humans make decisions, and whether having more choices really makes us happier.
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Nation & World
Circumstances that color our perception
Dozens of Harvard faculty and students gathered at Emerson Hall on Feb. 23 to ponder the nature of perception with Ned Block, the Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU) and one of the country’s leading thinkers on consciousness. Block’s lecture, “How Empirical Facts about Attention Transform Traditional Philosophical…
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Nation & World
Right choice, but not the intuitive one
When faced with a tough choice, we already have the cognitive tools we need to make the right decision, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology, told a Harvard Law School audience on Feb. 16. The hard part is overcoming the tricks our minds play on us that render rational decision-making nearly impossible.
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Nation & World
On the side of the angels
In his latest book, psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker cites data to show that the world is becoming far more peaceful than you might have thought.
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Nation & World
Reinforcement Theory
Mahzarin R. Banaji Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Nation & World
The Cognitive Revolution
Steven Pinker Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Harvard College Professor
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Nation & World
Three named MacArthur Fellows
Three Harvard faculty members — Roland Fryer Jr., Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics; Markus Greiner, associate professor of physics; and Matthew K. Nock, professor of psychology — are among the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation fellowships, also know as “genius” grants.
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Nation & World
The Aging Intellect
In this important book, Douglas H. Powell, a clinical instructor in psychology, discusses lifestyle habits and attitudes linked to cognitive aging, and provides evidence-based strategies to minimize mental decline.
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Nation & World
“The Young Ones” nominated for BAFTA
“The Young Ones,” a BBC series filmed with Harvard Professor of Psychology Ellen Langer, which replicates her Counterclockwise study using British celebrities, has been nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award.