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Eating fatty foods make people feel happier, less lonely, studies show
The New York Daily News: Stress eaters might reach for the pint of ice cream when they're feeling sad, but not because it tastes good. New research shows that fatty foods act as mood-lifters regardless of what they taste like, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation last week. Being delicious is just an extra bonus. Conducted out of the University of Leuven in Belgium, 12 healthy, nonobese subjects were hooked up to gastric feed tubes and unknowingly given either a fatty-acid solution or a saline solution, AFP RelaxNews reported. Subjects were then exposed to sad or neutral music and images and asked to report how they were feeling.
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Research: The Emotions of Aid
Stanford Social Innovation Review: “One death is a tragedy; 1 million is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin is supposed to have said. The more people we see suffering, the less we care. It’s an unfortunate quirk that psychologists so far have blamed on our brains: Humans are tuned to individuals, the thinking goes; we are just not capable of feeling compassion for whole groups. A new study calls that comfortable conclusion into question. “The collapse of compassion is an active process,” says Daryl Cameron, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s not some passive limitation on human experience.
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Mirroring reflects poorly in job interviews, study finds
The Toronto Star: Be prepared, wear a suit and remember to smile. And now another tip for job interviews: cut out the mirroring. A study in the upcoming issue of Psychological Science suggests matching your interviewer’s demeanour and mannerisms isn’t a solid strategy, particularly if a third party is there to see it. “Mimicry is a crucial part of social intelligence,” co-author Piotr Winkielman said in a release from the University of California, San Diego. “But it is not enough to simply know how to mimic.
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Les aliments gras remonteraient le moral, indépendamment de leur goût
Metro France: Une étude belge, publiée cette semaine dans le Journal of Clinical Investigation, renseigne sur les envies d'aliments gras que peuvent éprouver les personnes ayant le morale en berne. Surprise : elles n'auraient rien à voir avec leur goût. es chercheurs de l'Université de Louvain (Belgique) ont choisi douze participants de poids normal et en bonne santé, auxquels ils ont injecté des solutions concentrées en acides gras et des solutions de sérum physiologique, en présence d'images et de musique triste ou neutre. Les sujets auxquels on a injecté la solution grasse se disaient moins tristes que les personnes ayant reçu le sérum physiologique. Lire plus: Metro France
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Copying Someone’s Behavior? Watch Who You Mimic
LiveScience: While imitating another may be a sincere form of flattery, such mirroring can get you into trouble socially if you're copying the wrong person, new research shows. When participants in the study mirrored (or copied the mannerisms of) an unlikeable person, they were also judged as less competent and likeable by others, the researchers found. Mirroring happens all the time and has been shown to involve mirror neurons, which are the cells in the brain that activate when we watch someone else perform a particular action that we also perform ourselves. Read more: LiveScience
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Beat loneliness – to avoid a stroke: Why isolation is as bad for you as smoking
Daily Mail: Loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking. It seems astonishing, I know, but scientific research suggests that social isolation, in the long term, is as damaging as a 15-a-day cigarette habit or being an alcoholic. Other studies have found that those with a poor social network are at increased risk of dementia and high blood pressure, that the genes we need to fight off serious viral infections seem to be less active in the lonely than in the rest of the population, and that loneliness may cause cancer or heart disease. Read more: Daily Mail
