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Study: Moody Toddlers Could End Up as Compulsive Gamblers
Education Week: Is your 3-year-old overly cranky, impulsive and restless? If the answer is yes, you could be raising a future gambler. So says a new study published recently in the journal Psychological Science that found a correlation between so-called "under-controlled" temperament in preschoolers and compulsive gambling later in life. The study's researchers say their results suggest it may be possible to determine as early as age 3 whether a person is at increased risk of becoming a gambler, according to psychologist Wendy S. Slutske of the University of Missouri, Columbia. Slutske conducted the study along with Terrie E.
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Give Affect Science, Get Positive Emotion
A report from the 2012 Science & Engineering Festival WASHINGTON -- “Oh, I’m so glad that we found you!” one mother exclaimed as she and her young daughter approached the Affective Science Institute’s booth at last weekend’s U.S. Science and Engineering Festival on the National Mall. I started to tell her that one basic ingredient of emotion is called affect.
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Week in Ideas
The Wall Street Journal: Psychology Fast and Furious Could the hectic pace of modern life be spurring people to make risky choices? Researchers tested the effects of "thought speed" on appetite for risk. First, three dozen students read sentences aloud, at either twice their ordinary speed or half that speed, setting the pace for the brain. Then each participant played a computer simulation, getting five cents each time he or she pumped air into a balloon but losing the money if too much air went in and the balloon popped. People who had read quickly were more aggressive, attempting (and achieving) more pumps but also popping more balloons.
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Study of the Day: Social Inequality May Foster Distrust, Cheating in School
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: It's unclear which factors influence how dishonest people. Does the tendency to cheat lie in people's genes or psychological makeup? Or are environmental factors more to blame? METHODOLOGY: To uncover the roots of academic dishonesty, Queen's University researcher Lukas Neville looked into state-level data from Google searches made between 2003 and 2011 for phrases like "free term paper," "buy term paper," and the names of cheating websites. He compared these to statistics on income inequality and how trusting people are in each state.
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Why Jane Austen would approve of online dating
USA Today: David Merkur is suddenly the poster boy for everything that's wrong with the crass world of online dating. Merkur, a New York investment banker, created a spreadsheet to keep track of the women he was dating, most of whom he had met on Match.com. Then he e-mailed it to one of his dates, who forwarded it on to her friends, and it went viral. Naturally, some of the 11 other women Merkur dated — and rated, and tabulated — are angry. When singles who have found matches by computer algorithm start using Excel to keep track of their relationships, perhaps it's time to take a critical look at online dating. Have we allowed the tools of the market to intrude where they don't belong?
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5 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams
LiveScience: When your head hits the pillow, for many it's lights out for the conscious part of you. But the cells firing in your brain are very much awake, sparking enough energy to produce the sometimes vivid and sometimes downright haunted dreams that take place during the rapid-eye-movement stage of your sleep. Why do some people have nightmares while others really spend their nights in bliss? Like sleep, dreams are mysterious phenomena. But as scientists are able to probe deeper into our minds, they are finding some of those answers. Here's some of what we know about what goes on in dreamland. Read the whole story: LiveScience