Psychology @ Wooster Blog

Psych Club will be hosting a celebration for the seniors this Wednesday at 4 pm in the 1st floor lounge of Morgan Hall- snacks provided. All are welcome to join the festivities!!

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Researchers at University of Lübeck and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany delivered a pleasant scent (roses) while subjects were learning the location of matched card pairs (remember the game “Memory”?). They then delivered the scent again while the subjects were in slow wave sleep. The experimental subjects showed 13% better memory for the card pairs than control subjects. However, the memory enhancement only occurred when the scent was delivered during slow-wave sleep, a time when memories are thought to be consolidated. The research appears in the journal “Science” and is reviewed here in the NY Times.

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It’s time to start putting the finishing touches on that I.S. project. This is just a reminder that The College prohibits the use of The College Seal on any departmental documents (including I. S. manuscripts) without express written permission etc. Apparently, a while back, someone thought it looked nice on the cover of their I.S. Then, some other students thought it was required. Actually though, The College prohibits its use on I.S. manuscripts. Nonetheless, we still get one or two each year with the seal on it. Then we make you hand in a revision, without the seal.
Check out the official statute statement of the use of The College Seal.

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Okay, this is just a little scary. Apparently, some enterprising researchers in Berlin have determined how to predict someone’s intention to do high-level cognitive processes such as addition or subtraction by scanning their brain. So yes, I think we can safely say that technology has now allowed psychologists to read minds (at a greater than chance level in a forced choice task, for the moment). Let’s hope they use their powers for good instead of evil.
“If you knew which thought signatures to look for, you could theoretically predict in more detail what people were going to do in the future,” said Haynes. Apparently no official comment was immediately available from the ACLU…
Of course, this gives a whole new perspective on what finals week might look like 50 years from now…

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No, really…seeing the color red has recently been shown to cause poorer test performance because of its association with errors and mistakes. Sound like a flimsy finding appearing in a cheesy journal? Not so.  The study appears in the February issue of the prestigious Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Careful what you wear to your next exam.

Lead author Andrew J. Elliot and his colleagues next plan to study the effect of the color green on life satisfaction in what they hope to term the “Kermit the Frog Effect” (it’s not easy being green).  Okay, I made that last part up….

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