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Hot Days Turn Pitchers Into Hot Heads
U.S. News & World Report: Baseball pitchers intentionally "bean" more batters in retaliation during hot weather, finds a new study. Researchers analyzed data from more than 57,000 Major League baseball games from 1952 through 2009 and found that pitchers whose teammates were hit by a pitch were more likely to nail an opposing batter when the temperature reached 90 degrees F than on cooler days. If the temperatures were in the 50s during a game, there was a 22 percent chance a pitcher would hit a batter if a teammate had been hit by a pitch during the first inning. But the likelihood of such retribution increased to 27 percent if temperatures were in the 90s. Read the whole story: U.S.
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Study Examines Difference Between Abstract Expressionist Masterpieces And Paintings By Children
The Huffington Post: How often have you heard people describe artworks by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Cy Twombly as drawings that a 5-year-old child could have made? The answer is probably, very often. But is this true? Can children produce art whose perceived quality, as least by widespread artistic circles, matches that of renowned artists who sell their art for millions of dollars? Boston College psychologists Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner's research, recently published in the journal Psychological Science, seeks to answer this question.
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Study Highlights How Moms’ Depression, Anger Stresses Kids
Bloomberg: Even very young children can get stressed by depressed parents who display negative emotions toward them, researchers confirm. The new study included 3-year-old children who were subjected to different harmless, but stress-inducing, situations, such as causing them to become slightly nervous or frustrated. After each stressful event, saliva samples were taken from the children to measure levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The researchers also observed the interaction between children and their parents -- usually the mother -- as they did a task together or as the parent read a book to the child. Read the whole story: Bloomberg
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Formula for a Truly Funny April Fools
Want the recipe for pranks that will have guaranteed laughs on April fool’s day? A study published in Psychological Science found jokes that involve moral or norm violations are funnier but only when the moral violation seems benign, so the audience has psychological distance from it. Check out this video by the Pocket Scientist, George Zaidan, summarizing the study: In one experiment, volunteers were asked read pairs of situations, one of which had a moral violation (e.g. a rabbi promoting pork) while the other did not. The situation with the moral violation was more likely to make the reader laugh.
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How Well Do You Know Your Friends?
Some people know their friends’ triggers well; others have almost no idea what set their friends off. Research suggests that this difference has a noticeable impact on the relationship.
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Something for the weekend
FINANCIAL TIMES: Affairs of the heart is the number one cause for regret among US citizens according to research by a marketing professor and a professor of psychology. Either decisions made and acted upon about a love affair, or inaction over a romance, would appear to give individuals the most heart ache. Other causes for regret include, education, family and career. Neal Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and co-author Mike Morrison, a professor of psychology at the University of Illnois at Urbana-Champaign analysed data from a random sample of adult US citizens.
