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Decision-Making Under Stress: The Brain Remembers Rewards, Forgets Punishments
TIME: If you’re trying to make an important decision while the baby is crying, the boss is shouting on the phone and the cat has chosen this moment to think outside the box, you might want to take a breather and wait. A new review shows that acute stress affects the way the brain considers the pros and cons, causing it to focus on pleasure and ignore the possible negative consequences of a decision. The research has implications for everything from obesity and addictions to finance, suggesting that stress may modify the way people make choices in predictable ways.
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What’s the connection between sexual orientation and education?
Business Insider: Completing college doubled the likelihood that a man identified as gay or bisexual and was associated with a 900% increase in the chance of women identifying as lesbian or bisexual. A college education is associated with more liberal sexual attitudes and behavior, but this effect is greater for women than for men. Even more striking is the association between college education and sexual orientation shown in a recent national survey (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994). Read the whole story: Business Insider
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Hunger Affects What We See
Scientific American: Hunger is the best sauce. And it affects perceptions of anything related to food. Even words. Researchers tested two groups. One group just had lunch. The other hadn't eaten in four hours. The subjects watched computer screens as 80 words flashed by, each for about 1/300th of a second--that's too short to read the words, but just long enough to reach the threshold of conscious awareness. One quarter of the words were food-related. The rest were neutral non-food related words. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Girls asking, ‘Am I pretty?’ in online videos face thousands of vitriolic responses
The Washington Post: NEW YORK — The young girl shows off her big, comfy koala hat and forms playful hearts with her fingers as she drops the question on YouTube: “Am I pretty or ugly?” “A lot of people call me ugly, and I think I am ugly. I think I’m ugly, and fat,” she confesses in a tiny voice as she invites the world to decide. And the world did. The video, posted Dec. 17, 2010, has more than 4 million views and more than 107,000 anonymous, often hateful responses in a troubling phenomenon that has girls as young as 10 — and some boys — asking the same question on YouTube with similar results. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Still hungry? More Americans are having a ‘second breakfast’
USA Today: Sometimes one breakfast isn't enough. So why not sneak in a second or a third? On-the-go Americans increasingly are consuming their morning calories over several hours instead of sitting down to devour a plate of pancakes, bacon and eggs in one sitting. The case of the morning munchies is being fueled by the belief that it's healthier to eat several smaller meals instead of three squares a day. What qualifies as a snack or a meal is a matter of perspective, of course. But food companies are rolling out smaller bites that feed the growing appetite for morning snacks. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Stumped by a Problem? This Technique Unsticks You
Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts. “There’s a classic obstacle to innovation called ‘functional fixedness,’ which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts. It hinders people from solving problems.” McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the “generic parts technique” (GPT), which he describes in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. The article also reports on McCaffrey’s test of GPT’s effectiveness.
