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Stress is as contagious as a cold
Marie Claire UK: A new study reveals that it's not just the common cold that does the rounds in the office. You can also catch other people's stress. Professor Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist from the University of Hawaii, claims that if you sit by a whinger at work you are at risk of catching passive or second-hand stress and anxiety, which can quickly circulate the office. 'People seem to be capable of mimicking others facial, vocal and postural expressions with stunning rapidity,' she says. 'As a consequence, they are able to feel themselves into those other emotional lives to a surprising extent.' Read the full story: Marie Claire UK
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Being a beauty has its benefits
New Zealand Herald: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is only skin deep. The list of adages goes on and on, but a new book written by an economics professor at the University of Texas-Austin concludes that beauty brings many real benefits. Daniel S Hamermesh has studied the economics of beauty for about 20 years. In the book, Beauty Pays, he writes that attractive people enjoy many advantages while those who are less attractive often face discrimination. Hamermesh finds beautiful people are likely to be happier, earn more money, get a bank loan with a lower interest rate and marry a good-looking and highly educated spouse. Read the full story: New Zealand Herald
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The King of Human Error
Vanity Fair: We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them.
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Greater Performance Improvements When Quick Responses Are Rewarded More Than Accuracy Itself
ScienceBlogs: Last month's Frontiers in Psychology contains a fascinating study by Dambacher, Hübner, and Schlösser in which the authors demonstrate that the promise of financial reward can actually reduce performance when rewards are given for high accuracy. Counterintuitively, performance (characterized as accuracy per unit time) is actually better increased by financial rewards for response speed in particular. The authors demonstrated this surprising result using a flanker task. In Dambacher et al's "parity" version of the flanker, subjects had to determine whether the middle character in strings like "149" or "$6#" were even or odd.
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Understanding Your Mind Is Mission Critical
Scientific American: Earlier this year, Senator Tom Coburn published a report called “Under the Microscope,” in which he criticized the funding of any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important. Of particularly dubious value, in Coburn’s opinion, are the behavioral and social sciences—including my own field, psychology.
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What’s the Skinny on “Fat Talk”?
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Taylor Locker from the University of Florida present her poster session research on “Fat Talk”: Who’s Doing It, Why, and With Whom. Locker and coauthor Kelly Graf interviewed 197 undergraduates—152 women and 45 men—about self-reported use of fat talk, or self-disparaging comments about one’s body to represent and foster body dissatisfaction. Eighty percent of women and approximately half of men were able to recall at least one time in which they explicitly criticized their bodies for being “too fat” or expressed a desire to lose weight.