Study Alerts

The social motivation theory of autism     Coralie Chevallier, Gregor Kohls, Vanessa Troiani, Edward S. Brodkin and Robert T. Schultz  The idea that social motivation deficits play a central role in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has recently gained increased interest. This constitutes a shift in autism research, which has traditionally focused more intensely on cognitive […]

Predicting interest in and attitudes toward science from personality and need for cognition  Gregory J. Feist  One important task for psychologists of science is to examine the psychological factors (such as person- ality or cognition) that underlie who becomes interested in science and what kind of attitudes people develop toward science. Those were the primary […]

Influence of neuroticism and conscientiousness on working memory training outcome  Barbara Studer-Luethi, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, Walter J. Peril    We investigated whether and how individual differences in personality determine cognitive training outcomes. Forty-seven participants were either trained on a single or on a dual n-back task for a period of 4 weeks. Fifty-two […]

The Contribution of Emotion and Cognition to Moral Sensitivity: A Neurodevelopmental Study  Jean Decety, Kalina J. Michalska and Katherine D. Kinzler Abstract Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across […]

Making creative metaphors: The importance of fluid intelligence for creative thought Paul J. Silvia, Roger E. Beaty The relationship between intelligence and creativity remains controversial. The present re- search explored this issue by studying the role of fluid intelligence (Gf) in the generation of creative metaphors. Participants (n=132 young adults) completed six nonverbal tests of […]

Cognitive ability, self-assessed intelligence and personality: Common genetic but independent environmental aetiologies Denis Bratko, Ana Butkovic, Tena Vukasovic, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Sophie von Stumm Self-perceived abilities (SPA), which play an important role in academic achievement, have been recently reported to be fully attributable to genetic and non-shared environmental influ- ences. To replicate and extend this finding, […]

Trends in intelligence research Robert J. Sternberg and Scott Barry Kaufman ► Intelligence research has been of several kinds, three of which are (a) finding new correlates of g and (b) understanding better the nature of g, (c) expanding our conceptions of intelligence beyond g. ► In the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence, authors who have […]

Links Between Attention, Performance Pressure, and Movement in Skilled Motor Action     Rob Gray     The attentional focus adopted during the execution of a skilled motor action can have a profound effect on performance outcomes. Furthermore, it has been proposed that an “inward” shift in the focus of attention may be one of […]

Creative reasoning across developmental levels: Convergence and divergence in problem creation  Saskia Jaarsveld, Thomas Lachmann, Cees van Leeuwen We recently proposed the Creative Reasoning Test (CRT), a test for reasoning in ill-defined problem spaces. The test asks children who first performed the Standard Progressive Matrices test (SPM) to next generate an SPM-style test item themselves. […]

STUDY ALERT: The Small World of Psychopathology Denny Borsboom, Angelique O. J. Cramer, Verena D. Schmittmann, Sacha Epskamp, Lourens J. Waldorp Abstract Background: Mental disorders are highly comorbid: people having one disorder are likely to have another as well. We explain empirical comorbidity patterns based on a network model of psychiatric symptoms, derived from an […]

“It’s ok — Not everyone can be good at math”: Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students Aneeta Rattan, Catherine Good, Carol S. Dweck Can comforting struggling students demotivate them and potentially decrease the pool of students pursuing math- related subjects? In Studies 1–3, instructors holding an entity (fixed) theory of math intelligence […]

The Road Not Taken: Creative Solutions Require Avoidance of High-Frequency Responses Nitin Gupta, Yoonhee Jang, Sara C. Mednick, and David E. Huber To investigate individual differences in creativity as measured with a complex problem-solving task, we developed a computational model of the remote associates test (RAT). For 50 years, the RAT has been used to […]