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Your Brain on Injustice
Some people are just more worried about injustice than others. Lisa Simpson, from the animated television show The Simpsons, frets over the plight of the Tibetan people and whether it’s morally acceptable to eat animals — even when people around her remain relatively indifferent to these causes. And the chances are good that there’s a Lisa in your family or circle of friends. Psychological scientists are trying to determine whether injustice-oriented people like Lisa have a unique way of processing information.
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Solved: How Optical Illusion Turns Circles Into Hexagons
msnbc: When you stare at a colorful image and then turn to look at a neutral background, a "ghost image" appears in contrasting colors. Now, new research finds that a similar illusion occurs with shapes, turning circles into hexagons and vice versa. Though similar, the two visual phenomena have different causes. While the color optical illusion, occurs because of tired-out light-sensing cells in the eye, the shape afterimage illusion arises from the visual parts of the brain, said study researcher Hiroyuki Ito, of Kyushu University in Japan. "Afterimages are generally unnoticed or blurred," Ito wrote in an email to LiveScience.
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Not Guilty by Reason of Neuroscience
Slate Magazine: On Feb. 19, 1997, a house painter called 911 in Tampa, Fla. He had returned unannounced to a client’s house and through a window saw what appeared to be a naked man throttling a naked woman. When the police arrived, they learned the man hadn’t just strangled Roxanne Hayes; he had stabbed the mother-of-three multiple times, killing her. The murderer’s name was Lawrence Singleton; he was 69 years old, and he was notorious in California, where 19 years before, he had raped a 15-year-old hitchhiker, Mary Vincent; hacked off her forearms; and left her in a canyon to die.
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What’s the best way to phrase requests for maximum compliance?
Business Insider: Men's Health covers a study in Psychological Science: If a direction seems final, people just accept it, explains researcher Kristin Laurin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo. But if there is a possibility that the rule won’t happen, they long for the freedom that they would be restricted from and look for ways to get around the regulation. So whether you’re breaking it off with your girlfriend or asking an employee to take on a new project, the advice is the same: Be clear, firm, and direct. If you tell a rule in a definite and relevant manner, people are going to more likely embrace it and they won’t look for ways to cheat the rule, Laurin explains.
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Threats to the fetus during pregnancy
Chicago Tribune: Poor nutrition in the womb and infancy can reprogram the body's organs, setting the stage for disease decades down the road, according to the fetal origins theory. Much less is known about the impact of environmental and psychological exposures, but some potential threats include: Depression: In a study published in Psychological Science, pregnant women were checked for depression before and after birth. Researchers found that babies tended to thrive if their mothers were healthy both before and after birth and also if they were consistently depressed.
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Better Angels at Work
Huffington Post: In his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the world is becoming less violent because of an increase in intelligence and education. He demonstrates multiple data points to prove his case that statistically significant adjustments have occurred in human behavior to create more tolerant and humane societies. Other similar studies concur with his conclusions that the world is embracing its better angels. We can look at the contemporary experience of the workplace to see similar trend lines. You don't need to watch Mad Men to know that office behavior has changed radically in the last fifty years.