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Le pouvoir leur a monté à la taille!
Slate France: L’histoire ne manque pas d’exemples de personnages de petite taille (au sens propre) ayant exercé de grands pouvoirs. Lénine mesurait 1m65 comme Charlot, Louis XIV 1m62 (*) comme Beethoven, Mozart et Benoit XVI, Voltaire 1m60, Balzac 1m57, Jean-Paul Sartre 1m52, Jeanne d’Arc 1m50, Edith Piaf 1m42… Ces tailles, listées sur des sites comme Astrotheme, sont très souvent contestées. C’est le cas de celle de Nicolas Sarkozy. Donnée à 1m62 sur certains sites, elle est estimée à 1m68 par Astrotheme et à 1m65 dans un article du magazine Science du 12 janvier 2012 qui fait référence à une étude parue par la revue Psychological Science. Métaphore du pouvoir Michelle M.
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Made with love actually tastes better: study
New Zealand Herald: Convinced nothing can beat your mum's Sunday roast or grandmother's apple pie? You're probably right. Food that we believe has been prepared with tender loving care always tastes better, according to scientists. So if your friends and family constantly impress you with their culinary delights, it probably says as much about your relationship with them as it does about their prowess in the kitchen. Researchers looking into human experience found that our experience of a physical sensation, such as taste, is affected by how we perceive the person administering it.
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Sat-navs leave us in dark
Daily Express: We instinctively remember maps and end up with a north-facing “compass” in our heads. But over-reliance on GPS devices could erase the maps from our brains, scientists say. They ran virtual-reality tests on 26 residents of a town all had lived in for at least two years. Subjects were made “sightless” by artificial fog – and when facing north they could point to where locations would be in real life. Scientists Julia Frankenstein and Tobias Meilinge say the subjects did so well because they had all “seen, and internalised”, a map of their town, Tubingen in Germany. But the researchers warn that relying too much on GPS devices will eventually wipe out our memorised maps.
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Is gossip bad for you? New study finds health benefits
CBS News: Do you gossip? Even if the answer is yes, you're not likely to admit it. Gossip is generally frowned upon for its potential to spread harmful rumors or labeled as idle chatter. But a new study suggests gossip might be good for your social and psychological health. "Gossip gets a bad rap, but we're finding evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of social order," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, coauthor of the study published in this month's online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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Are Religious People Better Adjusted Psychologically?
Psychological research has found that religious people feel great about themselves, with a tendency toward higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than non-believers. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is only true in countries that put a high value on religion. The researchers got their data from eDarling, a European dating site that is affiliated with eHarmony. Like eHarmony, eDarling uses a long questionnaire to match clients with potential dates.
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New Research on the Antidepressant-Versus-Placebo Debate
TIME: In the 1990s, everyone was “Listening to Prozac,” after bestselling author Peter Kramer described sparkling personality transformations in patients who took the titular antidepressant drug. Then came the backlash: by the early 2000s, studies showed that Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, weren’t exactly miracle pills, but were instead associated with suicide, especially in kids and teens. Another whiplash-inducing turn came in 2008, when a review of the research found that the drugs were actually no more effective than sugar pills, except in cases of the most severe depression. Read the full story: TIME
