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Stress is as contagious as a cold
Marie Claire UK: A new study reveals that it's not just the common cold that does the rounds in the office. You can also catch other people's stress. Professor Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist from the University of Hawaii, claims that if you sit by a whinger at work you are at risk of catching passive or second-hand stress and anxiety, which can quickly circulate the office. 'People seem to be capable of mimicking others facial, vocal and postural expressions with stunning rapidity,' she says. 'As a consequence, they are able to feel themselves into those other emotional lives to a surprising extent.' Read the full story: Marie Claire UK
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Being a beauty has its benefits
New Zealand Herald: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is only skin deep. The list of adages goes on and on, but a new book written by an economics professor at the University of Texas-Austin concludes that beauty brings many real benefits. Daniel S Hamermesh has studied the economics of beauty for about 20 years. In the book, Beauty Pays, he writes that attractive people enjoy many advantages while those who are less attractive often face discrimination. Hamermesh finds beautiful people are likely to be happier, earn more money, get a bank loan with a lower interest rate and marry a good-looking and highly educated spouse. Read the full story: New Zealand Herald
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The Smartest Way to Overcome an Obstacle
The Huffington Post: Few important things in life come easy. Starting in school, there are days where assignments just don't go well. That concept you thought you had nailed in class has flown from your mind by the time you sit down to do your work. As you get older, the obstacles get more varied. You might want to buy a great new car, but you don't have the money. You could be thwarted at work by someone who has a different agenda. Or perhaps the economy has made it difficult for your business to push forward on a new venture. Dealing with obstacles is a crucial part of being successful in life. And there are lots of strategies we use to help us deal with them.
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Cranking Up Your Private Pep Rally
The Wall Street Journal: To summon the "calculated explosiveness" he felt he needed to clinch a motorcycle jump at this past summer's X-Games, Travis Pastrana cranked up AC/DC's "For Those About to Rock" before revving his engine. The motocross champion and race driver usually likes country music—nothing overly aggressive—to help him focus ahead of most other extreme-sporting feats. Going with the rock anthem for that jump "obviously hasn't worked out," says Mr. Pastrana, who broke his right foot and ankle when his twisting backflip failed at the Los Angeles event. Such can be the power of music to pump up a person for a performance—sometimes even too much.
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The King of Human Error
Vanity Fair: We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them.
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Greater Performance Improvements When Quick Responses Are Rewarded More Than Accuracy Itself
ScienceBlogs: Last month's Frontiers in Psychology contains a fascinating study by Dambacher, Hübner, and Schlösser in which the authors demonstrate that the promise of financial reward can actually reduce performance when rewards are given for high accuracy. Counterintuitively, performance (characterized as accuracy per unit time) is actually better increased by financial rewards for response speed in particular. The authors demonstrated this surprising result using a flanker task. In Dambacher et al's "parity" version of the flanker, subjects had to determine whether the middle character in strings like "149" or "$6#" were even or odd.
