Re: An Exciting New Approach To Personality Testing Involves Psychologists Analysing Your Decisions In Game Scenarios

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 1:32 AM BPS Research Digest <rd@lists.bps.org.uk> wrote:

Share on   Forward to a friend View this email in your browser BPS Approved Certificate in Third Wave CBT: an intensive 8 day course consisting of Mindfulness, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), Compassion Focused Therapy & Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) with a unique online overview & a final exam. Starts June 2019 at BPS, London or via Live Interactive Webcast. Learn More About this email Every week we bring you engaging reports on the latest psychology research. Anyone can subscribe free. We also provide daily updates on the latest psychology research via our app and on: Twitter Facebook Tumblr Issue Number: 454 Editor Dr Christian Jarrett Reach over 65,000 subscribers by placing your banner in this space. An Exciting New Approach To Personality Testing Involves Psychologists Analysing Your Decisions In Game Scenarios Personality traits are traits are traditionally assessed by asking people to rate how much various descriptive statements match their own personality, like "I enjoy talking to strangers". This cheap and easy approach has enjoyed great success – people's scores on such tests tend to be impressively consistent over time, and they predict important outcomes from health to career success. However, the questionnaires are far from perfect. Research volunteers might not properly engage out of boredom, for instance. Job candidates might deliberately fake their scores to give a favourable impression. An exciting possibility for overcoming these issues, according to a new paper in Personality and Individual Differences is to use a "gamification" approach – present people with behavioural options in engaging game-like scenarios and deduce their personality traits from their choices. Continue reading (and see an example) → Taking Tiny Breaks Is Key To Learning New Skills A wealth of research has shown that taking breaks is an important part of learning. Resting straight after acquiring new information seems to improve memory of that information, for example, and sleep is particularly important for consolidating what we have just learned.  Now it seems that even miniscule breaks, just seconds long, are also vital for learning new skills. A study published recently in Current Biology has found that most of the improvement while learning a motor task comes not while actually practicing, but instead during the breaks between practice sessions. Continue reading → People Have A Hard-To-Explain Bias Against Experimental Testing of Policies And Interventions, Preferring Just To See Them Implemented Randomised experiments (also known as A/B testing) are an absolutely critical tool for evaluating everything from online marketing campaigns to new pharmaceutical drugs to school curricula. Rather than making decisions based on ideology, intuition or educated guess-work,  you randomise people to one of two groups and expose one group to intervention A (one version of a social media headline, a new drug, or whatever, depending on the context ), one group to intervention B (a different version of the headline, a different drug etc), and compare outcomes for the two groups.  To anyone who believes in evidence-based decision making, medicine and policy, randomised tests make sense. But as a team led by Michelle N. Meyer at the Center for Translational Bioethics and Health Care Policy at the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, write in PNAS, for some reason A/B testing sometimes elicits moral outrage, and they've conducted several experiments to find out more about how widespread this disapproval is, and why. Continue reading → Microdosing Psychedelics Can Be Beneficial, But Not In The Way That Users Most Expect What if you could take a psychedelic drug regularly in such tiny quantities that the immediate effects were not discernible, yet over time it led to a range of psychological benefits, especially enhanced focus and heightened creativity? That's the principle behind "microdosing" – a controversial technique that's exploded in popularity ever since the publication of a 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorers Guide. Large online communities of microdosing enthusiasts have since emerged on sites like Reddit, where dosing tips are shared and the supposed manifold benefits of the practice are espoused. However, actual scientific investigations into the effects of microdosing can be counted on one hand. Earlier this year, PLOS One published one of the few systematic investigations ever conducted into the practice, by Vince Polito and Richard Stevenson at Macquarie University. Continue reading → Kids Are More Motivated To "Do Science" Than "Be A Scientist" It's well known that science has a diversity problem, with women and members of minority groups being underrepresented. A new study suggests a solution aimed at children – reframing science as something that people do, rather than something that defines their identity, can reduce the potentially off-putting impact of the "white male" scientist stereotype. According to the paper, published recently in Developmental Science, thoughtful use of language encourages greater interest in science among young children – and makes them less likely to lose confidence in their scientific abilities as they grow up. Continue reading → Editor's pick: Story-listening Shows Promise As An Intervention For People Living With Dementia Listening to a story is known to be cognitively demanding, in part because the listener has to pay close attention to, and remember, plot and character detail in order to understand what's going on. Attention and memory are both diminished in people living with dementia. Might regularly reading aloud to such people help, then, to train their attention and memory, and function as a treatment? A recent study of people with various kinds of dementia, published in Psychology and Neuroscience, suggests that it could. Continue reading →   The Psychologist The Psychologist is the monthly magazine of the British Psychological Society. Visit our website for the May issue and latest online articles, including Improving the lives of those affected by dementia – For Dementia Action Week we bring you our top picks on dementia. Also check out all our latest reports and feature articles and much more. Reach a large, international and professional audience: advertise in The Psychologist or Research Digest Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list Our mailing address is: The British Psychological Society St Andrews House 48 Princess Road East Leicester, LE1 7DR United Kingdom Add us to your address book The British Psychological Society is a charity registered in England and Wales (SC039452), and Scotland (229642). 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