-
Day Old Chickens Prefer The Same Music That You Do
Scientific American: You might have more in common with the chicken on your plate than you realize. Sure, you’ve also got two thighs, two legs, two breasts, and two wings (sort of). But new research suggests that chickens might like to rock out to the same tunes you’ve got on your iPod. The kinds of sounds that humans tend to find pleasant is called consonant, which are different from from unpleasant sounds, which are called dissonant. Think of the difference between a Mozart sonata and fingernails on a chalkboard, and you’re on the right track. Consonant notes sound – to the untrained ear – as if they were a single tone, while a you can identify multiple tones within a dissonant note.
-
Say This, Get Your Way
Men's Health Magazine: f people don’t listen to you, it’s not that they don’t respect you—it could be how you’re phrasing your request, suggests a new study published in Psychological Science. In the study, college students who were told that speed limit laws were about to take effect accepted and agreed with the new regulations. But when the laws were said to be possibly going into effect, more students expressed outrage. What’s going on? If a direction seems final, people just accept it, explains researcher Kristin Laurin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo.
-
How ‘Social’ Is Social Networking?
Huffington Post: I like Facebook. I've been signing into the site fairly regularly for a couple years now, and it has become my large extended family's primary form of communication. It also keeps me connected with friends and former colleagues -- people I like a lot but would never stay in touch with otherwise. We share photos, update personal news, comment on politics and pop culture -- nothing serious, but it's still more connection than I would have in a previous era. In that sense, Facebook is certainly a social lubricant for many of its 500 million users, facilitating fast and effortless and widespread connection.
-
Optimism, Race, and Blood Pressure
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Bryan Jensen from Brigham Young University present his poster session research entitled “Race/Ethnic Differences in Ambulatory Blood Pressure Might Not Be Optimal.” To conduct this APSSC Award–winning research, Jensen and his coauthors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Patrick R. Steffen recruited 582 adults to participate in a 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) study.
-
How Do Whites Perceive Biracial People?
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Sabrica Barnett from The City University of New York present her poster research on “Not Fully Black, but Not Fully White: Whites’ Perceptions of Black-White Biracials.” Barnett and her coauthor Daryl A. Wout won an APSSC Award for this research, in which they compared Whites’ ratings of perceived similarity, competence, and warmth for Blacks, Whites, and Black/White biracials.
-
NIA Grants for Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics of Aging
Purpose: The National Institute on Aging (NIA) issues these Program Announcements with special review to stimulate interdisciplinary aging-relevant research in the social, affective and economic neurosciences. The NIA invites applications examining social, emotional and economic behaviors of relevance to aging, using approaches that examine mechanisms and processes at both (a) the social, behavioral or psychological (emotional, cognitive, motivational) level, and (b) the neurobiological or genetic level. Proposals are encouraged that have an overriding emphasis on economic, social or emotional processes and associated genetic or neurobiological processes.
