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The Real Risks of ‘Racy’ Thinking
Huffington Post: I worked in the news business for many years, and sometimes the pace could get hectic. But the work day didn't really charge up until mid-morning. In the early-morning hours, my routine was to leaf through several of the day's newspapers, including the sports section, usually with my feet up on my desk. Occasionally I would check the AP ticker or turn on the TV, but not until after I had spent some time with the papers and my morning coffee. This was back in the 20th century, of course, and looking back, that pace seems almost leisurely by today's standards. Technology has radically altered the way that many of us consume information.
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Comfort or Food? This Harlow Love Song Has the Answer
Harry Harlow conducted his famous experiments on maternal separation and social isolation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, Brad Wray and his independent study students from Arundel High School in Maryland have set one of those experiments to music. Harlow took baby monkeys from their mothers and placed them with two “surrogate” mothers: one made of wire that dispensed milk and one made of terry cloth that didn’t dispense milk. The song, set to the tune of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” tells how the baby monkeys had to make a choice.
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Police officers at risk of memory loss after physical exertion
Metro News: Just 60 seconds of adrenaline-pumping activity can 'seriously damage' their recollection of the event, according to UK scientists. They say forgetfulness is often triggered by high-energy events like chasing a suspect. Lorraine Hope, from the University of Portsmouth, believes her findings, published in journal Psychological Science, flag up the potential problems with witness statements. She said: 'Police officers are often expected to remember in detail who said what and how many blows were received or given in the midst of physical struggle or shortly afterwards.
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Visual illusions may help boost sports performance
Yahoo! India: One of the ways in which a player might be able to improve his chances at making a free throw during a basketball tournament could be by tricking himself into thinking that the basket is bigger than it really is, a new study has suggested. Purdue University's psychological scientist Jessi Witt, who has played sports her whole life, started studying how perception relates to sports performance in graduate school. "You hear about athletes making these comments like, oh, I was playing so well, everything seemed like it was moving in slow motion," she said. Much of her research has examined this effect-how people who are doing well at a sport seem to see the world differently.
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The Bad Science Reporting Effect
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The press coverage of the so-called “QWERTY effect” in early March left me somewhat worried that it is so easy to publish bad science, but absolutely appalled at the state of science reporting. The alleged effect is that average scores on reported positivity or happiness associations are slightly higher for words having more letters from the right-hand side of the keyboard. By late on March 8, Mark Liberman at Language Log had re-examined the relevant statistics, noting that the effect is extremely weak. It could explain about a 10th of one percent of the variance in positive vs. negative affective judgments about words, if it existed.
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Keep your cool with wrong hand
Yahoo! India: People who find it difficult to rein in their aggression and yell at others even for silly mistakes can benefit by simply using the wrong hand in daily life and thereby practice self control, suggests a study. According to Thomas Denson of the University of New South Wales, right handers should get into the habit of using a computer mouse, stirring a cup of coffee or opening a door with their left hand and left-handers should do the opposite, the Daily Mail reported. Training yourself to use the wrong hand seems to act as practice for other kinds of self control, such as being polite. Just two weeks of the exercises reduce the tendency to act on impulse, he says.