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Guys Prefer Electric Shocks to Boredom
Scientific American: How often have you longed to have time to just sit quietly and think? Well, be careful what you wish for. Because a study shows that many people find such interludes incredibly unpleasant. So uncomfortable, in fact, that they would rather zap themselves with electricity than be left alone with their thoughts. The shocking results appear in the journal Science. [Timothy D. Wilson et al, Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind]In the experiment, participants were asked to sit alone in a room for up to 15 minutes…with no cell phone, no reading material, no music—so, nothing to entertain them, save their own rambling thoughts.
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The Restaurant Menu That Nudges People Toward Healthy Food
The Atlantic: The diner menu is a peculiar thing: It's meant to be scrutinized when one is, at best, hungover. But it's packed with a dizzying array of options that requires a sharp mind to parse. Its offerings are usually basic comforts, yet it has the comprehensiveness and heft of the Book of Deuteronomy. Do you go with the "Boss Hog" sandwich, with its puddle of BBQ sauce, or do you atone for whatever brought you to the diner in the first place by ordering the house salad?
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Bouncing to the Beatles Breeds Benevolent Babies
Pacific Standard: As part of our ongoing inquiry into the evolutionary origins of music, we’ve noted a line of research that links altruistic behavior with synchronized sounds. A study from England found eight- to 11-year-olds who made music together were also more compassionate than their peers. Another from Germany found four-year-olds who had sung and marched together were more likely to help one another pick up spilled marbles. New Canadian research presents further evidence of this dynamic—and finds it applies at a much younger age.
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Why Names Are So Easy to Forget
The Atlantic: Once, at a party, I was introduced to a friend of a friend. We shook hands, I told her my name, she told me hers. Then she did something that I was ever so grateful for. "Hang on," she said. "Can you say your name again? I wasn't really listening." She saved me from having to later—possibly even at the same party—sheepishly admit that I, too, had already forgotten her name. An informal poll of fellow Atlantic staffers confirmed my suspicion that this is something that happens to even the most kind and conscientious among us. No sooner does someone utter the most fundamental factoid about themselves than the information flees our brains forever.
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Can Where the Wild Things Are Teach Kids Empathy?
New York Magazine: Kids who spend their early years lost in the imaginary worlds of children’s fiction —Where the Wild Things Are, Corduroy,Beatrix Potter’s stories of Peter Rabbit — may be getting more out of the stories than pure entertainment. Narrative fiction seems to make young children more empathetic, according to research presented at this weekend’s American Psychological Association convention in San Francisco. Fiction, of course, lets you see the world through another set of eyes, and that isn’t lost on young children, argued York University psychologist Raymond Mar.
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Children’s Drawings May Indicate Later Intelligence
How 4-year-old children draw pictures of a child is an indicator of intelligence at age 14, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers studied 7,752 pairs of identical and non-identical twins (a total of 15,504 children) from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the UK, and found that the link between drawing and later intelligence seemed to be influenced by genes. At the age of 4, children were asked by their parents to complete a ‘Draw-a-Child’ test, i.e. draw a picture of a child.
