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People Think The “Typical” Member Of A Group Looks Like Them
What does a typical European face look like according to Europeans? It all depends on which European you ask. Germans think the typical European looks more German; Portuguese people think the typical European looks more Portuguese. That’s the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results shed light on how people think about groups they belong to. Other studies have found that, when people choose typical characteristics for a group they’re in, they’ll pick characteristics more like themselves. But that research was done using words.
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Working Moms: Work-Life Balance Affected By Language Used, Kellogg Study Finds
Huffington Post: Very few employers have figured out how to make work -- and life -- manageable for working mothers, but what if it's not just our work-life policies that are flawed? What if even the language we use to discuss working motherhood is problematic and making it more difficult for women to navigate office and family life? That's the argument made by Nicole Stephens, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, based on research she conducted from April to November 2010.
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Men With Wide Faces: Frauds or Financial Wizards?
Forbes: I’m not sure what to think about this new research, so I’ll just pass it on . . . Men with wider faces not only are perceived as untrustworthy, they may deserve the reputation, according to an article in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee discovered that broad-faced men appear more likely to deceive their counterparts in negotiations and are more willing to cheat in order to increase their financial gain. In one study, experimenters measured the facial width-to-height ratio of 192 Masters of Business Administration students, 115 of whom were men.
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Happiness, Philosophy and Science
The New York Times: Philosophy was the origin of most scientific disciplines. Aristotle was in some sense an astronomer, a physicist, a biologist, a psychologist and a political scientist. As various philosophical subdiscplines found ways of treating their topics with full empirical rigor, they gradually separated themselves from philosophy, which increasingly became a purely armchair enterprise, working not from controlled experiments but from common-sense experiences and conceptual analysis.
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Changing One Word to Get Health-Care Workers to Wash Their Hands.
The Wall Street Journal: Ah, the simple act of hand-washing. It’s a simple, cheap way to prevent spreading infection in hospitals. And yet, research suggests compliance with so-called “hand hygiene” guidelines is less than 50% in many hospitals. Proposed solutions have included penalizing doctors and nurses who don’t follow the rules, sending in undergrad volunteers to look over the shoulders of staff, using video surveillance to identify offenders and employing high-tech sensors to gauge whether a health-care worker has recently used alcohol gel.
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The mama grizzlies: Why mothers who breast-feed are more aggressive at protecting their young than those that use the bottle
Daily Mail: Women who breast-feed are far more likely to aggressively protect their infants and themselves than women who bottle-feed their babies, claim researchers. Female grizzly bears are known for their especially aggressive behaviour when protecting their young. Now a study has found that when breast-feeding women behave aggressively, they register a lower blood pressure than other women. Researchers say the results suggest that breast-feeding can help dampen the body's typical stress response to fear, giving women the extra courage they need to defend themselves. Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, a postdoctoral fellow in the UCLA Department of Psychology in the U.S.