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Pizza or Brussels sprouts? How we process food choices
Los Angeles Times: Do you lack self-control when it comes to food? If so, maybe you need to slow down a bit. At least that's the suggestion of researchers who recently exposed a group of 28 hungry college students to a series of computer images of food and asked them to mouse click on the grub they preferred. Their conclusion? It takes longer for people to mentally process the health value of food than it does for them to process its anticipated taste. The findings were published Monday in the journal Psychological Science.
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Here Are the Things Introverts Say on Facebook
New York Magazine: The things you say on Facebook apparently reveal a lot about your personality, according to a large new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that finds an association between words used in Facebook posts and personality traits. The results are pretty fascinating, not because they're surprising but because they're so spot-on, exactly what you'd expect from introverts, extroverts, and the like. Introverts, for example, tend to mention stereotypical introvert-y things in their status updates: computer, internet, read, anime — to an extent, these are words suggesting that they were posted while the writer was holed up at home.
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Handwriting vs typing: is the pen still mightier than the keyboard?
The Guardian: In the past few days you may well have scribbled out a shopping list on the back of an envelope or stuck a Post-it on your desk. Perhaps you added a comment to your child’s report book or made a few quick notes during a meeting. But when did you last draft a long text by hand? How long ago did you write your last “proper” letter, using a pen and a sheet of writing paper? Are you among the increasing number of people, at work, who are switching completely from writing to typing?
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The High Costs of Status Seeking
The Huffington Post: It's well known that income inequality leads to all sorts of social problems. The bigger the gap between the affluent and the poor, the higher the rates of homicide, teenage pregnancy and infant mortality, to name just a few of the negative outcomes. Unequal societies are also more polarized politically, and their economies are not as robust. Despite all this evidence of untoward consequences, it's not really known why this is the case. What is the psychosocial link between income gaps and societal dysfunction?
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A Meditation on the Art of Not Trying
The New York Times: Just be yourself. The advice is as maddening as it is inescapable. It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself. But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself? How you can force yourself to relax? How can you try not to try? It makes no sense, but the paradox is essential to civilization, according to Edward Slingerland. He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists.
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Who needs a hug? Anyone trying to ward off a cold this winter.
The Washington Post: Do you need a hug? If you're trying to ward off colds and the flu this winter — and who isn't? — the answer is yes, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers released Wednesday and scheduled for publication in the journal Psychological Science. "The apparent protective effect of hugs may be attributable to the physical contact itself or to hugging being a behavioral indicator of support and intimacy," Sheldon Cohen, a professor of psychology, and his team wrote.
