-
Understanding the Zombie Teen’s Body Clock
The Wall Street Journal: Many parents know the scene: The groggy, sleep-deprived teenager stumbles through breakfast and falls asleep over afternoon homework, only to spring to life, wide-eyed and alert, at 10 p.m.—just as Mom and Dad are nodding off. Fortunately for parents, science has gotten more sophisticated at explaining why, starting at puberty, a teen's internal sleep-wake clock seems to go off the rails. Researchers are also connecting the dots between the resulting sleep loss and behavior long chalked up to just "being a teenager." This includes more risk-taking, less self-control, a drop in school performance and a rise in the incidence of depression.
-
Influence in Times of Crisis: How Do Men and Women Evaluate Precarious Leadership Positions?
We’ve all heard of the “glass ceiling” but the recent economic crisis has illuminated another workplace phenomenon: the “glass cliff.” Women seem to be overrepresented in precarious leadership positions at organizations going through crisis. Evidence is growing that more feminine leadership traits, such as being understanding and tactful, are believed to be desirable under such circumstances, causing people to make a “think crisis – think female” association. But is it that women are always passively selected into these jobs or do they sometimes also actively seek them out?
-
Parenting and Temperament in Childhood Predict Later Political Ideology
Political mindsets are the product of an individual’s upbringing, life experiences, and environment. But are there specific experiences that lead a person to choose one political ideology over another? New research from psychological scientist R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues suggest that parenting practices and childhood temperament may play an influential role. Their study is published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
-
Hot hands and hoops: Irrational belief in the NBA
Professional basketball begins again next week, and dedicated fans will be happy to put last year’s labor disputes and lockout behind them. But many will also remember 2011-2012 as a magical season. It was the season of Jeremy Lin, a New York Knicks point guard who, for a few weeks last winter, captured the country’s imagination. Lin was an unheralded and undrafted bench player from Harvard, one of the few Asian Americans in the NBA, whose unlikely hot streak landed him on the cover of Sports Illustrated—twice, back to back. He made headlines beyond the sporting press as well, from Time to the Associated Press, and was the subject of seven instant books.
-
Elizabeth Warren, Scott Brown and the Myth of Race
TIME: If, as David Axelrod once said, “Campaigns are like an MRI for the soul,” then what do we see when we peer into the campaigns of Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown and his challenger, liberal icon Elizabeth Warren? We see a classic culture clash: town vs. gown, the Red Sox vs. the Head of the Charles Regatta, a small-town guy with an iconic pickup truck vs. a Harvard professor who’s a national star. Brown’s latest ad attacks Warren as if she has been caught in a lie about her racial background: Warren claims to be part Cherokee and Delaware Indian. In her response ad, she says she never benefited professionally from her heritage, a claim backed up by officials who hired her.
-
The more money we have, the fewer problems we see
The Washington Post: “Money doesn’t buy happiness” is a cliche for a reason. The Nobel laureate psychologist/economist Daniel Kahneman and Princeton economist Angus Deaton have found that “emotional well-being” (that is, what emotions people report themselves as having felt the previous day) maxes out at around $75,000 of annual income, even though peoples’ evaluations of how well their lives are going rise indefinitely with income. “We conclude,” Kahneman and Deaton write, “that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness.” But this kind of analysis can be problematic when it’s used to compare whole societies, rather than individual people.
