The Broken Windows theory of crime reduction, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book The Tipping Point, has received new robust empirical support from a series of studies by Dutch researchers.According to the theory, more serious crimes can…
Serendipitous timing has allowed researchers in Canada to capture the brain activity of a woman experiencing a spontaneous sense of someone else being in the room with her, when really she was alone.This feeling of sensed presence is rather common. For…
The results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) are in, and they show that 11 per cent of the UK’s psychological research, as submitted by 76 universities, was judged to be of the highest ‘world leading’ 4* standard.The results of the RAE,…
As you go shopping for Christmas presents this holiday, bear in mind that buying the wrong gift for a man could put your relationship with him in jeopardy, whereas buying a bad gift for a woman is far less dangerous.That’s according to Elizabeth Dunn a…
Alzheimer’s disease is devastating and yet new research is highlighting the islands of function and ability that can and do survive the tide of illness (for example see these earlier Digest items). In a moving and inspirational forthcoming book, “I’m S…
Alzheimer’s disease is devastating and yet new research is highlighting the islands of function and ability that can and do survive the tide of illness (for example see these earlier Digest items). In a moving and inspirational forthcoming book, “I’m S…
People with more conscientious personalities, who have greater ambition and discipline, live longer. That’s according to Margaret Kern and Howard Friedman who combined data on this topic from over 20 previous studies, involving more than 8,900 particip…
We trawl the web for the latest psychology journal special issues so you don’t have to:Twenty Years of Exciting Neuroscience (Neuron). Happy Birthday Neuron! This is a must-read issue published to mark the 20th anniversary of the journal, and, so far a…
So much contemporary research in psychology focuses on the flaws in our thinking and the errors in our decision making. There is something refreshing therefore in a new study by Louis Lee and colleagues who have used the digit-placement puzzle Sudoku t…
As the recession bites, Newsweek magazine has a timely article on some of the brain processes underlying consumer decision making. The author Begley particularly emphasises research showing that people tend to be willing to spend more when they pay by …
