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When a woman should act like a man
CNN: Tilia Wong worked in construction management before going to business school and got used to thinking of herself as a businesswoman who knew how to keep assertive behavior under wraps. "I'm a 24-year-old Asian girl telling a 55-year-old white guy what to do. I had to tone it down," she said of her workplace experience. Fast forward to this year, when Wong began an MBA at Stanford University and had to reassess herself because classmates told her she was actually on the aggressive end of the spectrum. Read the whole story: CNN
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Greased Palm Psychology: Collectivism and Bribery
Cultures that downplay self-determination and stress shared responsibility may serve as a catalyst for passing money under the table, a study suggests.
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Heartache or headache, pain process is similar, studies find
Los Angeles Times: The brain's shared pain network illustrates the link between body and mind, and it may help explain how emotional ups or downs affect health too. Across cultures and language divides, people talk about the sting of social rejection as if it were a physical pain. We feel "burned" by a partner's infidelity, "wounded" by a friend's harsh words, "crushed" when a loved one fails us, "heartache" when spurned by a lover. There's a reason for that linguistic conflation, says a growing community of pain researchers: In our brains too, physical and social pain share much the same neural circuitry.
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Being Bilingual May Boost Your Brain Power
NPR: In an interconnected world, speaking more than one language is becoming increasingly common. Approximately one-fifth of Americans speak a non-English language at home, and globally, as many as two-thirds of children are brought up bilingual. Research suggests that the growing numbers of bilingual speakers may have an advantage that goes beyond communication: It turns out that being bilingual is also good for your brain. Judy and Paul Szentkiralyi both grew up bilingual in the U.S., speaking Hungarian with their families and English with their peers. When they first started dating, they spoke English with each other.
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Addiction to food, drugs similar in the brain
CNN: Ice cream and other tasty, high-calorie foods would seem to have little in common with cocaine, but in some people's brains they can elicit cravings and trigger responses similar to those caused by addictive drugs, a new study suggests. Women whose relationship to food resembles dependence or addiction -- those who often lose control and eat more than they'd planned, for example -- appear to anticipate food in much the same way that drug addicts anticipate a fix, according to the study, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans. Read the whole story: CNN
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Foolish Familiarity
You’re running late to an important meeting; there’s a cab close by from a company you don’t know and a cab farther away from a company you know well, which one do you choose? The first cab is the smarter choice since you’re in a hurry, but research suggests most people would choose the one they’re familiar with. A study published in Psychological Science found that people prefer a familiar option over a non-familiar one, even when they know it’s the worst option. Volunteers played a game called Math Tower that was designed to be boring, unpleasant, and hard.