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Money and Mimicry
“Money, money, money Must be funny Money, money, money Always sunny In the rich man’s world.” -ABBA, 1976 We rely on money in our day-to-day life and it is constantly in our minds. After all, money makes the world go round, doesn’t it? Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, tries to better understand the psychological effect of money and how it affects our behavior, feelings and emotions.
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Why Does a Baby Strike Out in Anger? A Study Looks At The Family Risks
A baby is set on the floor to play with other babies and she yanks a toy away from a playmate or shoves him in frustration or anger. What makes some infants aggressive? Does something adverse happen in the womb? Is it life with Mom and Dad that ramps up their anti-social behavior? Or both? These are the questions that a group of Cardiff University psychologists—Dale Hay, Lisa Mundy, Siwan Roberts, Raffaella Carta, Cerith Waters, Oliver Perra, Roland Jones, Ian Jones, Ian Goodyer, Gordon Harold, Anita Thapar, and Stephanie van Goozen—are exploring in a large-scale, nationally representative longitudinal study of 271 British infants and their parents.
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Those Graphic New Cigarette Labels Won’t Help, Psychology Says
Discover Magazine: What’s the News: Starting in September 2012, the FDA will require every pack of cigarettes sold in the US to be emblazoned with a large, text-and-image health warning, similar to the labels already seen in Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and several other countries. The FDA unveiled the nine label designs earlier this week; several are quite graphic, including photos of cancerous lungs and lips and a man exhaling smoke through his tracheotomy hole. Read more: Discover Magazine
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Power, alcohol make you drop guard
Times of India: Power can either lead to great acts of altruism, or corruptive, unethical behaviour. Being intoxicated can lead to a first date, or a bar brawl. And the mask of anonymity can encourage one individual to let a stranger know they have toilet paper stuck to their shoe, whereas another may post salacious photos online. What is the common thread that binds three disparate behaviours? Read more: Times of India
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It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right
The New York Times: ONE of the great strengths of science is that it can fix its own mistakes. “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong,” the astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said. “That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.” If only it were that simple. Scientists can certainly point with pride to many self-corrections, but science is not like an iPhone; it does not instantly auto-correct. As a series of controversies over the past few months have demonstrated, science fixes its mistakes more slowly, more fitfully and with more difficulty than Sagan’s words would suggest.
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Why Trolls Behave the Way They Do
The Wall Street Journal: People who troll online get the same thrill from it as drinking and exercising power according to U.S. researchers. Apparently anonymity means web users lose their inhibitions in much the same way as alcohol reduces people’s inhibitions. The people’s true characters are revealed, according to research conducted by Northwestern University. Read more: The Wall Street Journal