Health News

Employee incentives can lead to unethical behavior in the workplace

Considering end-of-year bonuses for your employees? Supervisors be forewarned, a new study finds that while incentive rewards can help motivate and increase employee performance it can also lead to unethical behavior in the workplace. “Goal fixation can have a profound impact on employee behavior, and the damaging effects appear to be growing stronger in today’s […]

Health News

Personality and mood affect brain response to personal choice

Personality traits and mental health affect how people value personal control in decision making, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. Our brain’s reward and motivation systems show higher activity when we feel personal control in a situation and when we receive rewards that we’ve earned, rather than been given […]

Health News

Binary bias distorts how we integrate information

When we evaluate and compare a range of data points — whether that data is related to health outcomes, head counts, or menu prices — we tend to neglect the relative strength of the evidence and treat it as simply binary, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological […]

Health News

Research affirms the power of ‘we’: Largest-ever analysis of couples’ pronoun use affirms the relationship between

A healthy relationship starts with the word “we.” Past research by UC Riverside psychologist Megan Robbins has emphasized the power of first-person personal pronouns such as “we” and “us” in relationships. “We-talk” is an indicator of interdependence, meaning partners affect one another’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This is a shift from self-oriented to relationship-oriented. New […]

Health News

If pigeons were brilliant, would they flock? Study finds people flock, or behave similarly to others, despite reasoning abilities

Crowd panics, market bubbles, and other unpredictable collective behaviors would not happen if people were smart about these things and just thought through their behavior before they acted. Right? That’s the perspective in economics, and even psychology and sociology. But a UC Davis researcher looked at how people behave in simple reasoning games and found […]

Health News

Do rock climbers seek out high-risk climbs?

The sport of rock climbing is gaining international attention, having been approved for inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games. But news headlines about the sport are still dominated by reports of gruesome injuries and near-death falls. Are rock climbers going out of their way to seek these risks? A new study published in Risk Analysis: […]

Health Problems

Criminal behavior linked to thinking about risk, study finds

A new study shows a difference between how risk is cognitively processed by self-reported law-abiding citizens and self-reported lawbreakers, allowing researchers to better view and understand the criminal mind. Along with her team, Valerie Reyna, Lois and Melvin Tukman Professor of Human Development and director of the Cornell University Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility, examined neurological […]

Health News

Forget the bling: High status-signaling deters new friendships

When it comes to making new friends, status symbols actually repel people from making friends with us, according to new research published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. “Often times we think that status symbols — whether a luxury car like a BMW, a brand name purse like Prada, or an expensive watch […]