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Does money make you mean?
BBC News Magazine: The road along the seafront in Los Angeles is lined with palm trees - skateboarders and dog-walkers stroll along, heading for the beach. And social psychologist Prof Paul Piff is spending the afternoon going back and forth over a pedestrian crossing. Thanks to the high number of wealthy locals, there is no shortage of upmarket vehicles gliding past. The four-wheel drives, sleek sports cars and nifty hybrids are an essential part of his demonstration. He's here to illustrate one of his more provocative experiments - who is more likely to stop for pedestrians, the rich or the poor? ...
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The goosebumps test: Science has found the emotion you need to stay healthy
Quartz: A link has long been proven between negative moods and ill health. But how do positive moods affect us physiologically? Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, set out to discover exactly that when they tracked emotions such as compassion, joy, love, and so on versus the levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6)—a secretion which causes inflammation in the body—in the saliva of 119 university students. The researchers found that those who regularly have positive emotions have less IL-6—and they noticed the strongest correlation with one particular emotion. Awe.
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The Healthiest Typeface
The Atlantic: In a New York Times column in July 2012, the filmmaker Errol Morris took a few paragraphs to ponder the likelihood of death by asteroid. “NASA issued reassuring public statements [after an asteroid flew close to Earth in 2011], but I’m not so sure,” he wrote. “It’s about the size of an aircraft carrier. Okay. That seems pretty big to me. Do you mean I shouldn’t worry about being hit by a meteor the size of an aircraft carrier?” He then asked two questions of his readers: Did they agree, as the physicist David Deutsch put it, that—at least asteroid-wise—“we live in an era of unprecedented safety”? And how confident were they in their choice? Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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The Danger of Even Thinking You’re Overweight
Pacific Standard: The last three decades have brought an alarming rise in childhood obesity. Much of society's attention has centered on kids who've already put on a few too many pounds, but that overlooks one important group of kids: teens who think they're more overweight than they actually are. Turns out, their misperceptions greatly increase the chances they'll be obese as young adults.
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The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things
Fast Company's Co. Exist Most people are in the pursuit of happiness. There are economists who think happiness is the best indicator of the health of a society. We know that money can make you happier, though after your basic needs are met, it doesn't make you that much happier. But one of the biggest questions is how to allocate our money, which is (for most of us) a limited resource. There's a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation. According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong.
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No Easy, Reliable Way To Screen For Suicide
NPR: Even a careful psychiatric examination of the co-pilot involved in last week's Germanwings jetliner crash probably would not have revealed whether he intended to kill himself, researchers say. "As a field, we're not very good at accurately predicting who is at risk for suicidal behavior," says Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard. He says studies show that mental health professionals "perform no better than chance" when it comes to predicting which patients will attempt suicide. Read the whole story: NPR
