An Emotional Election

Politics and emotions are deeply intertwined. Think of the last political conversation you had and how you reacted to it emotionally. Was your blood boiling with anger? Were you paralyzed with anxiety and worry about what might happen? Were you bouncing with enthusiasm and motivated to go get out the vote?

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Bigger picture, how do these emotional-political experiences (specifically, of anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm) affect the ways we seek out and interpret political messages and engage in political behavior?

Olympics Fun: National Personality Types: Fact or Figment?

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With the summer Olympics fast approaching, and our nation's birthday on Americans' minds, July seemed an apt month to dig a little into the concept of national personalities. For instance, we may have ideas of what typical French or German or British people are like relative to typical Americans. But are these ideas just oversimplified stereotypes, or are they rooted in actual country-level differences in personality characteristics?

Well, opinions vary.

The Importance of Being Agreeable

Consider, for a moment, two very different people:

Draco

Neville 

Neville is a friendly, warm person who tends to cooperate with and trust others. He generally expects the best of people, and tends to be generous and helpful towards others. He tries to be modest about himself.

Draco, on the other hand, is an aloof, rude person who tends to be competitive and suspicious of others. He’s cynical about people – he doesn’t expect them to return favors, so he’s not that likely to be helpful. He thinks modesty is overrated.

How would personality psychology say these two differ? Well, they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum of “agreeableness” – if you feel more similar to Neville, you’re probably high in agreeableness, and if Draco hits closer to home, you’re probably relatively disagreeable. Agreeableness captures how interpersonally warm, trusting, modest, altruistic, cooperative, straightforward, sympathetic, and easygoing you are, and is one of the building blocks of personality.

So what does being agreeable mean for your work life and parenting styles? How about your health outcomes and environmental behavior? Let’s see what the literature has to say.

Pets with benefits: Social support from other species

 The millions of Americans who own pets spend billions of dollars on them annually, shower them in love, and – anecdotally – talk and post about them constantly (you know who you are). But besides providing us something totally adorable to photograph and cuddle with, what good is it to have a furry, domesticated animal running around your home?

Rue and Racism: Intergroup dynamics and the Hunger Games

 Today we have the second installment of awesome guest blogger Maya Kuehn's posts on the psychology behind the Hunger Games. Check out the first installment here.

Rue

In the original, written version of The Hunger Games, it’s made fairly clear that both Rue and her fellow District 11 tribute, Thresh, are African American. Yet when faced with their ethnicity on the movie screen, many people have expressed great disappointment (to state it delicately) over these tragic characters not being White. But why?

Well, it turns out that empathy across group boundaries is a complicated matter. Although part of the glue holding society together is a desire to reduce the suffering of others, and though we’re quick to empathize with and help members of our own groups, this dynamic can go haywire when it must extend to members of different groups (Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011).

Mind Games: The Psychology of the Hunger Games

Guest blogger Maya Kuehn is back with a two-part post on the psychology of the Hunger Games. So sit back and enjoy another round of “at the movies with a psychologist.”

Watching The Hunger Games come to life on screen (at, full disclosure, a midnight show), I found that actually witnessing the slaughter of several teenagers was more gut-wrenchingly graphic than it had seemed in the books. So when (PYM blogger and fellow social psychologist) Amie asked me whether the movie was gruesome, I had to admit it was. But because I can’t resist translating my bizarrely specific psychological know-how to daily advice, I encouraged her to use her favorite emotion regulation strategy while viewing the more horrifying scenes. Just what does this mean, and what other aspects of The Hunger Games could social psychology address? Allow me to elaborate. 

Valentine's Day Special: An Insider's Guide to Speed Dating

This week's guest blogger is Maya Kuehn, a fellow graduate student at UC Berkeley. We're thrilled to have this talented researcher and writer contribute to the blog. In this post she'll be discussing research on speed dating.

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To my never-ending delight, being a social psychologist can sometimes make me feel like I have an insider’s guide to social life. When I discovered that two dear friends of mine were about to try speed dating for the first time, I couldn’t help offering some (yes, unsolicited) terribly handy research-based advice: “Be selective! They’ll like you more if you don’t show interest in everybody.” My random tip amused my friends, but my outburst didn’t do justice to the scope of research done on speed dating in our field in recent years. For you, dear readers, just in time for Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d provide a quick and dirty guide to the basics of what goes down in speed dating interactions.

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First, a bit of background: speed dating began in the late 90’s in LA, and has rapidly spread since. In a typical session people participate in a round-robin series of interactions, meeting each eligible partner for a 3-8 minute speed date and rating interest in them afterwards. If two people indicate mutual interest (i.e., match), each is provided with his or her match’s contact info. The super short format of these dates lets people make rapid decisions about each other’s eligibility as a mate, and as such provides a rich microcosm of the first impression and romantic attraction dynamics psychologists have speculated about and researched for decades. As you might expect, our field has started studying speed dating interactions to distill the basic elements of initial interpersonal attraction. So what have we found?