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Luxe wheels don’t roll humdrum worries away
New York Post: Taking the wheel of a new Mercedes-Benz or BMW might be love at first touch, but the pleasure won't last long enough to make you happy. A new study of motorists in the US says the instant buzz of driving an $80,000 luxury car is too fleeting to lift a person out of the daily ruts of life, and may not be worth the big showroom price. "A luxury car is indeed more fun than an economy car. But most of the time, the driver's mind is preoccupied with the mundane issues of daily life and the car makes little difference," said Norbert Schwarz, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan. "Hedonic experiences are fleeting." Read more: New York Post
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How The Brain Keeps Track of What We’re Doing
“Working memory” is what we have to keep track of things moment to moment: driving on a highway and focusing on the vehicles around us, then forgetting them as we move on; remembering all the names at the dinner party while conversing with one person about her job. Most psychologists explain working memory with a “controlled attention” model: one flexible system that directs the brain’s focus to stimuli and tasks that are important and suppressing the rest. The capacity of working memory, they say, is limited by our ability to attend to only one thing at a time.
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Sneezes Provoke Fears Beyond Illness
Scientific American: With H1N1 on the rise and flu shots hard to find, few things are as terrifying as [sneeze sound]. But now a report in the journal Psychological Science suggests that coughing and sneezing can spread more than viruses. They also spread fear, of germs and more. So you’re on line for a movie when the guy behind you lets loose a big, juicy [sneeze sound]. Maybe you hold your breath, or maybe you decide to skip the flick and go home to scrub your hands like you’re Lady Macbeth . Well, psychologists got to wondering whether that well-grounded caution could snowball into an overarching skittishness about disease and other things. Read more: Scientific American
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Key To A Happy Marriage: Be Delusional
Forbes: Finally, a study that makes perfect sense. According to a study published in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, the happiest marriages are the ones that are the most, well, delusional. As reported today in the Los Angeles Time the study shows that of 222 newlywed couples who were followed for three years, those who had an abnormally high level of “rose colored” glasses about each other were the only pairs who didn’t show a decline in their level of marriage happiness. Read more: Forbes
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Who Takes Risks?
It’s a common belief that women take fewer risks than men, and that adolescents always plunge in headlong without considering the consequences. But the reality of who takes risks when is actually a bit more complicated, according to the authors of a new paper which will be published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Adolescents can be as cool-headed as anyone, and in some realms, women take more risks than men. A lot of what psychologists know about risk-taking comes from lab studies where people are asked to choose between a guaranteed amount of money or a gamble for a larger amount.
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The Hazy Science of Hot Weather and Violence
Wired News: The link between violence and hot weather is so intuitive that it’s embedded in our language: Hotheads lose tempers that flare, anger simmers and comes to a boil, and eventually we cool down. So what does science have to say? Do tempers truly soar with temperature? The answer, appropriately enough for these triple-digit days, is hazy and hotly contested. To be sure, extensive literature exists on hot weather and violence, stretching from poorly controlled regional studies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — oh, those hot-blooded southerners! — to more sophisticated modern analyses.