Color me impressed! Psychology research links colors and emotions for over a century

Color fills our world. Color makes our visual landscape exciting, vibrant, and full of character. Color also has meaning that extends far beyond color. Different cultures have associated meanings to different colors. Green, yellow, and red may be linked to traffic signals. Brown, orange, and yellow may indicate a seasonal change in nature. Universities are […]

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“The butler did it”: Familiarity influences lineup identifications

Picking someone out of a lineup can be tough. Bias in eyewitness testimony is a complicated factor that can influence judicial proceedings. When eyewitnesses identify a criminal, they need to recognize a person’s face, and they need to place them at the scene of the crime. That’s a difficult task for most passersby. We might […]

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“Same or different” controlled by distinct brain systems

The “same or different” concept is something we all learned as a child. We were shown two images and asked if they were the same or different. This activity teaches us to compare objects in the world; it introduces critical thinking and has applications in mathematics. The same/different task has also been used in visual […]

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The distracting power of colorful food

Have you ever noticed that restaurants often advertise their food with vibrant, bright colors—highlighting every juicy morsel of the meal? The reasoning is simple: colorful photography makes the food more appetizing and makes us (the viewer) more likely to buy it. Some believe that this type of advertising even contributes to overeating habits when marketing […]

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Flippity fetching fudge: Phonemes and profanity across languages

Ah, the power of swear words. Whether you curse like a sailor or never use foul language, we all know a swear word when we hear it. They have a special ability to convey one’s emotion with particular emphasis—whether grief, pain, anger, fear, desire, joy, or surprise. Sometimes, the most reasonable emotional reaction is a […]

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Playing with words: How the Brysbaert lab developed a new battery of language tests

“The impious warbler delved into the paltry aperitif and anointed the pumice with ineffable rigmarole.” That’s a sentence with a lot of big words (and I hope it’s never been uttered before), but if you understood that I was referring to a nasty little bird that wiped some booze on a rock, then you may […]

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To sleep, perchance to learn speech motor control

The night before a big exam, college students may attempt to “study” by listening to their recorded notes while they fall asleep. They may feel that processing the information before sleep will help them remember it better the next day. A number of studies have shown this to be effective, even though it didn’t help […]

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