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Senior Citizens Extending Health and Wellness with Video Games
Yahoo News: To promote staying sharp and remaining active as you age, http://www.SeniorsGuideOnline.com is encouraging seniors to play video games. Research and studies show that video games on the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 rank high in strengthening senior health and physical abilities. Video games are not just for kids anymore and there is a new generation of gamers who are having fun while staying young – Senior Citizens. Seniors have become one of the strongest and enthusiastic users of the Nintendo Wii. Currently many Independent Living, Assisted Living and Skilled Nursing Home have a TV, if not an entire room dedicated to the Nintendo Wii and its activity games.
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Do The Funky…Pigeon
You could read Emma Ware’s PhD thesis to find out how social dynamics influence the behavior of pigeons…or, you could watch her dance. Ware was the Social Science winner of the 2011 Dance Your PhD Contest, sponsored by Science and TEDxBrussels. Her dance shows that when confronted when an unresponsive female pigeon on a prerecorded video, the courtship behavior of male pigeons decreased. Courtship behavior also decreased in response to a nine-second delay in the female’s response. In contrast, the male’s courtship behavior didn’t decrease in response to one-second delays, three-second delays, or spatial manipulations.
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The Pupils are the Windows to the Mind
The eyes are the window into the soul—or at least the mind, according to a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Measuring the diameter of the pupil, the part of the eye that changes size to let in more light, can show what a person is paying attention to. Pupillometry, as it’s called, has been used in social psychology, clinical psychology, humans, animals, children, infants—and it should be used even more, the authors say. The pupil is best known for changing size in reaction to light.
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Religious people feel better than non-believers, but only in devout societies: study
National Post: Religious people tend to feel better about themselves and their lives, but a new study finds that this benefit may only hold in places where everyone else is religious, too. According to the new study of almost 200,000 people in 11 European countries, people who are religious have higher self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than the non-religious only in countries where belief in religion is common. In more secular societies, the religious and the non-religious are equally well-off. Read the full story:
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In dumb luck we can trust
The Sydney Morning Herald: For those interested in events and ideas, our days are full of explanations. Every morning the columnists tell us why politicians acted as they did yesterday. At school and university our children study the causes of historical events. Come evening and the television explains why the market has gone up or down, and the current affairs shows present pundits who predict the future of politics, economics, and international affairs. It seems that the smarter we are, the more we need to know not simply what happened, but why.
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The Amygdala And Fear Are Not The Same Thing
In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated - displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of black people. This link between the amygdala and fear – especially a fear of others unlike us, has gone too far, not only in pop culture, but also in psychological science, say the authors of a new paper which will be published in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Indeed, many experiments have found that the amygdala is active when people are afraid.
