Education needs a psychological approach to its process and mechanism. Contemporary psychology is rooted in philosophical thought and physiological inquiry. Psychology cannot be separated from the influence of three schools in philosophy, i.e., materialism, empiricism, and positivism. One of the empiricist thinkers who gave nuances and color in…

In August 2015, in an article entitled "Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychology Science," the journal "Science" reported the findings of a comprehensive collaboration of social scientist researchers, collectively described as the "Open Science Collaboration" (OSC), who replicated the findings of 100 experiments…

Understanding neurocognitive mechanisms in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an essential goal of autism research. Studying young children with ASD or other neurodevelopmental conditions in demanding experimental settings, however, can pose many practical and ethical challenges. In this article, we present practical strategies that…

The present work examined whether secrets are experienced as physical burdens, thereby influencing perception and action. Four studies examined the behavior of people who harbored important secrets, such as secrets concerning infidelity and sexual orientation. People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated…

The authors examined the evolution of cognitive and emotional responses to terror risks for a nationally representative sample of Americans between late 2001 and late 2002. Respondents' risk judgments changed in ways consistent with their reported personal experiences. However, they did not recognize these changes, producing hindsight bias in…

Comics and graphic novels have made a greater impact on popular culture in recent years and can be used for enhancing the learning experience of psychology students. One of the best known and respected comic book writers of the last 30 years is Alan Moore, who has included a number of detailed references to psychological studies and experiments in…

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first…

In recent years, single-case designs have increasingly been used to establish an empirical basis for evidence-based interventions and techniques in a variety of disciplines, including psychology and education. Although traditional single-case designs have typically not met the criteria for a randomized controlled trial relative to conventional…

People tend to perceive immediate emotions as more intense than previous emotions. This "immediacy bias" in emotion perception occurred for exposure to emotional but not neutral stimuli (Study 1), when emotional stimuli were separated by both shorter (2 s; Studies 1 and 2) and longer (20 min; Studies 3, 4, and 5) delays, and for emotional…

Psychological research has placed great emphasis on inhibitory control due to its integral role in normal cognition and clinical disorders. The stop-signal task and associated measure--stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)--provides a well-established paradigm for measuring response inhibition. However, motivational influences on stop-signal…

Traditionally, dual-task interference has been attributed to the consequences of task load exceeding capacity limitations. However, the current study demonstrates that in addition to task load, the mutual compatibility of the concurrent processes modulates whether 2 tasks can be performed in parallel. In 2 psychological refractory period…

Three experiments evaluated whether the magnitude of the list-method directed forgetting effect is strength dependent. Throughout these studies, items were strengthened via operations thought to increase context strength (spaced presentations) or manipulations thought to increment the item strength without affecting the context strength…

The hedonic benefit of a gain (e.g., receiving $100) may be increased by segregating it into smaller units that are distributed over time (e.g., receiving $50 on each of 2 days). However, if these units are too small (e.g., receiving 1 cent on each of 10,000 days), they may fall beneath the person's hedonic limen and have no hedonic benefit at…

Boundedly rational heuristics for inference can be surprisingly accurate and frugal for several reasons. They can exploit environmental structures, co-opt complex capacities, and elude effortful search by exploiting information that automatically arrives on the mental stage. The fluency heuristic is a prime example of a heuristic that makes the…

Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluations of information to support a tentatively preferred option? The authors test the following 3 decision process goals as the potential drivers of such distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of evaluating new information, (b) to increase the separation…