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On 9/11, Americans may not have been as angry as you thought they were
On September 11, 2001, the air was sizzling with anger—and the anger got hotter as the hours passed. That, anyway, was one finding of a 2010 analysis by Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, and Boris Egloff of 85,000 pager messages sent that day. The researchers employed a commonly used tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, which teases out information from the frequency of word usages in texts. But were Americans really so angry? Clemson University psychologist Cynthia L. S. Pury wasn’t out to answer this question when she made the discovery that was just published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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The Tricky Chemistry of Attraction
The Wall Street Journal: Much of the attraction between the sexes is chemistry. New studies suggest that when women use hormonal contraceptives, such as birth-control pills, it disrupts some of these chemical signals, affecting their attractiveness to men and women's own preferences for romantic partners. The type of man a woman is drawn to is known to change during her monthly cycle—when a woman is fertile, for instance, she might look for a man with more masculine features. Taking the pill or another type of hormonal contraceptive upends this natural dynamic, making less-masculine men seem more attractive, according to a small but growing body of evidence.
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To Eat or Not to Eat (Yet)
Check out this humorous rendition of APS Past-President Walter Mischel's 1972 Stanford Marshmallow Test. Could you be as patient as some of these kids? Mischel will be speaking at the Connected Theme Program at the 2011 Convention.
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Miracle Fruit: The Results Are In!
Magical Miracle Fruit The Results Are In! At Convention last year APS Past-President Linda Bartoshuk led a miracle fruit experiment with the audience during the Presidential Symposium in Boston, MA. Audience members tasted 'miracle fruit,' a freeze-dried West African berry, that changed the way they tasted fruit they ate afterwards. Check out last year's video below and be sure to swing by Poster Session VIII, Board 132 to see the results of the experiment on display.
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How Right and Left Shape Right and Wrong
The Wall Street Journal: “The wise man’s heart is at his right hand,” says Ecclesiastes, “but the fool’s heart is at his left.” Islamic law says that Muslims should use their right hands alone for eating and drinking, because Satan uses his left. We may think that the preference for “right” over “left” is purely cultural, but, in fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that it is shaped by our bodily experience. Experiments find that right-handed people—and something like 90% of the population is right-handed—unconsciously prefer people and objects placed to their right; meanwhile, left-handers prefer people and things to their left. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Men ponder food and sleep as much as sex
MSNBC: Men think about sex every seven seconds, right? Not according to a new study that finds men ponder sleep and food as much as they do sex. The median number of thoughts about sex by college-age men was 18 times a day to women's 10 times a day, the study found. But the men also thought about food and sleep proportionately more. "In other words, there was nothing special about sexual thoughts," study researcher Terri Fisher, a psychologist at The Ohio State University, Mansfield, told LiveScience. "Males thought more about any of the health-related thoughts compared to females, not just thoughts about sex." Read the whole story: MSNBC
