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The palate’s Prozac
Brisbane Times: When the recession hit (the first time around), you could hear the words buzzing from the mobile phone of every restaurant consultant around the world: "It's time for comfort food." But behind the cottage pies and creamy mash lies a question: what does "comfort food" really mean? What about it actually comforts us? Let's look at some big-time comfort foods: cheese on toast, boiled eggs and soldiers, apple crumble, chocolate cake. When people talk about comfort food, the obvious explanation is that it's all about nostalgia and missing Mum's cooking. But, really, it takes more than this to create the rush of sensations that make us feel safe, calm and cared for.
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Companies With Wide-Faced CEOs Have Been Shown To Perform Better Financially
Business Insider: I’m not sure what the appropriate reaction is to this study, so I’ll let you decide. New research led by Elaine Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has found that CEOs with wider faces tend to lead their companies to better financial performance than CEOs whose faces are skinnier. Can this be true? And if so, why? The researchers say that broader faces, in men, are a result of more testosterone, and note that male hockey players with broader faces have been shown to spend more time in the penalty box for fighting, which is again supposedly linked to testosterone.
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Coffee Break? Walk in the Park? Why Unwinding Is Hard
The Wall Street Journal: A college student deep into studying for a big exam might do well to give his brain a break. Just what he does during that break will determine how helpful that pause will be, a growing body of research shows. A stroll in the park could do wonders, for instance, while downing coffee could leave him just as stressed and depleted as before the break. And, sometimes, forcing oneself to simply power through mental fatigue can be more effective than pausing.
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The Cars
The Colbert Report: Stephen: But now there's a modern way to cram all the data into our sense holes, and it brings us to tonight's Word: Head in the Cloud. Folks, to deal with information overload the human brain uses something called transactive memory, relying on friends and family to remember things you don't have space for, like when a husband remembers to pay the electric bill while the wife remembers everything he's done wrong for the past 10 years. (Like criticizing her on TV) Now our brains are applying the same technique online. It seems that Betsy Sparrow, Columbia researcher and Decemberist song lyric recently publishes a report called Memory in the Age of Google.
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Men and women take different risks: study
Calgary Herald: A growing number of studies suggest that having women in a company's boardroom and executive suites fundamentally changes a corporation's decision-making process - and can improve the balance sheet too. While this is usually attributed to the fact that women take fewer risks than men, a study published this month suggests the stereotype of women as cautious riskavoiders misses the mark. Bernd Figner, a scientist at the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School, who studies when and how people take risks, suggests women are every bit as likely to step outside their security zones as men - the two sexes just do so in different ways.
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Is Shape of CEO’s Face a Measure of Power?
U.S. News & World Report: The width of a CEO's face may predict how well a company performs, according to a new study. Researchers compared the photos of 55 male CEOs of Fortune 500 organizations with their companies' financial performance. The study included only men because previous research found that a link between face shape and behavior applies only to men. The firms of CEOs with wider faces, relative to face height, performed much better than businesses led by CEOs with narrower faces, said Elaine M. Wong, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and colleagues. Read the full story: U.S. News & World Report