Welcome to the Weekly Medius PsychNews. Every week, we select five thought-provoking Psychology articles from the hundreds published in journals and other media. Psychology Drives Everything.

 

 How much news coverage is OK for children?
All of us have spent time listening to news coverage about tragic events, such as natural disasters, acts of terrorism and events with the loss of human life. We hear stories from survivors and are touched by their tales of heroism. Through these firsthand accounts, we may feel connected to a tragedy even if we are not personally involved. As adults watch, so too do children. They may be playing in a room where the TV is tuned to coverage. They hear adults talking. They may not always understand what is being said, but sometimes that confusion can be a source of anxiety and worry. Full article.


How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail:
Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data. Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. Full article.
  Our daily lives consist of absorbing unrealistic expectations from media for what we should look like, how our romantic relationships should be, and even what we should be doing between the sheets with our sexual partners. It’s no wonder that our social media profiles are merely presentations of who we think we should be and not reflections of who we really are. We’re just trying to fit in, be liked, and be accepted by other human beings — no one would possibly like us for who we really are, we might think. So how do we get past all this and learn how to just be ourselves? Full article.
Your native language affects what you can and can’t see:
The idea that the language that you speak influences how you think about and experience the world (the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has a long and storied history. A lot of research into the issue has focused on colour perception, and evidence has accumulated that people whose native languages have different colour categories don’t see the world in quite the same way. Now in a new paper, published in Psychological Science, Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman at the Humboldt University of Berlin report that by affecting visual processing at an early stage, such linguistic differences can even determine whether someone will see a coloured shape – or they won’t. “Our native language is thus one of the forces that determine what we consciously perceive,” they write. Full article.
Merely desiring to alter your personality is not enough, and may backfire unless you take concrete action to change:
Debate about how much a person’s character can and can’t change have occupied psychologists for decades, but a growing consensus is beginning to emerge. While our traits are relatively stable, they are not fixed. Change is often passive – that is, experience leaves its mark on personality. But excitingly, initial findings suggest that we can also change ourselves. What prior research has so far not addressed, however, is whether simply desiring to change is enough (perhaps by triggering automatic, subtle shifts in our identity and behaviour), or whether we must take deliberate, active steps to change. A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explores this question. Full article.