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Positive thinking? It’s not enough to reach your goals
USA Today: "Dream it. Wish it. Do it" is a popular T-shirt slogan. It is not a very good way to change your life – as countless people who made New Year's resolutions to lose weight, start exercising or improve work habits are learning right about now. Positive thinking has its merits, but it has been seriously oversold as a way to achieve goals, a growing body of research shows. If you want to change, you might want to confront your dreams with some hard, cold, even negative reality, studies show. "It's so pleasant to believe that positive fantasies will work," says Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University.
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How Do We Respond to Parenthood?
Pacific Standard: Yes, men have a harder time than women adjusting to life as new parents. But that blanket statement covers up important differences between individual men and women—specifically how those differences affect couples making the transition to parenthood, according to a new study. Maybe this goes without saying, but men and women respond differently when the stork comes calling, reporting different levels of satisfaction with their relationships depending on their individual childcare responsibilities.
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Transgender Kids Show Consistent Gender Identity Across Measures
A study with children ages 5 to 12 indicates that the gender identity of these children is deeply held and is not the result of confusion about gender identity.
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What a Child Can Teach a Smart Computer
The Wall Street Journal: Every January the intellectual impresario and literary agent John Brockman (who represents me, I should disclose) asks a large group of thinkers a single question on his website, edge.org. This year it is: “What do you think about machines that think?” There are lots of interesting answers, ranging from the skeptical to the apocalyptic. I’m not sure that asking whether machines can think is the right question, though. As someone once said, it’s like asking whether submarines can swim. But we can ask whether machines can learn, and especially, whether they can learn as well as 3-year-olds. Everyone knows that Alan Turing helped to invent the very idea of computation.
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Want To Know When You’ll Die? Ask Your Friends
Refinery29: Your best friends know your favorite band and brunch place and exactly what movie will cheer you up. Sometimes, you may even feel like they know you better than you know yourself. Now, research suggests they might be able to accurately predict some pretty big things — like how long you'll live. We've known for a while now that there's a link between personality traits and lifespan. This new study, published online earlier this month in the journal Psychological Science, wanted to take that a step further by looking at whether our friends' ratings of our personalities can more accurately predict our mortality risk than our own self-ratings can.
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Les tweets négatifs permettent de prédire la fréquence des attaques cardiaques (oui oui)
Slate: Dans la longue liste de corrélations en apparence absurdes entre deux phénomènes observées ces dernières années, la récente trouvaille d’une équipe de chercheurs de la Penn University restera dans les annales. En géolocalisant des tweets répartis sur 1.500 comtés américains, ils ont identifié un lien entre les tweets exprimant des sentiments négatifs et… le taux d’infarctus. Dans le résumé de leur article à paraître dans la revue Psychological Science, les chercheurs expliquent avoir recherché des formulations ou des termes qui reflètent la présence de relations sociales et d’émotions négatives (par exemple la colère).
