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To Heighten Creativity, Take a Good Look at Your Selves
Pacific Standard: Having trouble coming up with creative ideas? Well, who do you think you are? That’s not a put-down: It’s a fundamentally important question, and newly published research suggests answering it can help inspire innovative thinking. Specifically, it concludes spending a few minutes pondering the various identities you wear—spouse, parent, employee, sports fan, political partisan, what-have-you—can lead to more creative insights. “A more versatile, integrated, or flexible self-view ... may offer a simple way to boost creativity,” writes a research team led by University of Chicago psychologist Sarah Gaither.
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Feeding Mental Health Through Nutritional Interventions
Depression treatments include both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy, but a burgeoning area of research points to another potent therapy: nutrition
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Can Angry Tweets Predict Heart-Disease Rates?
New York Magazine: Never before in human history have so many people expressed their emotions so publicly. Every day, countless gigabytes of happiness and sadness and frustration and every other conceivable feeling are dumped onto the web, whether in the form of ecstatic Facebook statuses or paranoid blog posts. Gifted with a mother lode of new psychological data, researchers are eagerly lapping up as much of it as possible in an attempt to better understand homo sapiens. Naturally, Twitter is a major nexus for this sort of research.
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News Anchor Brian Williams and the Science of Memory
Memory distortion has become a hot topic this week in the wake of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams’s admission of falsely recounting one of his experiences during coverage of the Iraq War. For years, Williams talked about riding in a helicopter that was ultimately forced down after taking fire during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But this week he publicly apologized and admitted that he had been mistaken after reports surfaced that he was not in that particular aircraft, but in a following helicopter. Williams said he made a mistake in recalling the incident, having conflated video he had seen with his own experience.
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Can hugs make you healthier?
Salon: It’s February. Are you sick? If you are, don’t fret. The Centers for Disease Control tells us that cold and flu season peaks in January and February, so statistically speaking, your sniffles are nothing special. And, believe me, I feel for you. I have a 4-year-old daughter who is the most thoroughgoing germ collector known to humankind. Every day she trots home from her language immersion preschool, an international clearinghouse for viruses. I’ve lost count of how many times she has walked in coughing and sniffling, a little pouty and with her arms outstretched, looking for a consolatory hug.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Targeted Rejection Predicts Decreased Anti-Inflammatory Gene Expression and Increased Symptom Severity in Youth With Asthma Michael L. M. Murphy, George M. Slavich, Edith Chen, and Gregory E. Miller Targeted rejection -- the intentional rejection of a person by an individual or group -- seems to be a uniquely damaging form of interpersonal stress. Participants between the ages of 9 and 18 with diagnosed asthma were assessed every 6 months for 2 years. At each assessment, participants underwent a blood draw and a stress interview and reported their daily asthma symptoms for 2 weeks following each visit.
