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Something for the weekend
Financial Times: We are all familiar with the pain of rejection - not being invited to a party, or being excluded in a conversation. Now a psychology academic and an assistant professor of management and organisation have examined the impact of social rejection. They have concluded that even if individuals are sympathetic to the social snubs experienced by another, they do not understand how upset the person concerned actually feels.
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Hanging up on home phones
The Montreal Gazette: Ever find yourself wondering whether it's worth it to keep and, perhaps more importantly, pay for that home phone line? Even though a majority of Canadian homes have at least one cellphone, most are not completely abandoning their land lines. Statistics Canada says 78 per cent of Canadian households had cellphones in 2010, up from 74 per cent two years earlier. Households with land line phones stood at 67 per cent last year, down from 83 per cent in 2008. But the land line versus cellphone question is one many 20-something Canadians don't even ponder.
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Can Our Immune Systems Tell Us Who’s Sick?
Discovery News: The placebo effect relies on the mind's ability to influence the body, but does the same work in reverse? For instance, after being sick, can the body's immune system subconsciously tell us who's sick so we can avoid getting sick again? In one early analysis on the topic, researchers think it's certainly possible. The research, featured in the journal Psychological Science, suggests people who recently felt ill are primed to notice and avoid others who appear sick around them. In this sense, their biological immune systems and behavioral immune systems work together in some way to help avoid future illness.
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How Not To Cope With a Personal Insult
Humans have always had to cope with threats, both big and small. The physical and life-threatening threats that our ancestors faced have largely been replaced by social threats, but they are nonetheless an emotional menace: Insults, rejections and criticism can undermine our integrity and self-esteem, even our sense that the world is a meaningful place. Sometimes we cope with these threats smoothly, and other times awkwardly—sometimes disastrously. Is there a single, most effective strategy for dealing with life’s constant battering?
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Watching The World In Motion, Babies Take A First Step Toward Language
Watching children on the playground, we see them run, climb, slide, get up, and do it all again. While their movements are continuous, we language-users can easily divide them up and name each one. But what about people—babies—who don’t yet have words? How do they make sense of a world in motion? An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, finds that infants at seven to nine months are able to slice up the flow of events, even before they start to speak. And the researchers believe they’ve identified the way that babies accomplish this feat.
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Scientists Hint at Why Laughter Feels So Good
The New York Times: Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good. The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect. His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said.
