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Stop On Red! The Effects of Color May Lie Deep in Evolution…
Almost universally, red means stop. Red means danger. Red means hot. And analyzing the results in the 2004 Olympics, researchers have found that red also means dominance. Athletes wearing red prevailed more often than those wearing blue, especially in hand-to-hand sports like wrestling. Why? Is it random? Is it cultural? Or does it have evolutionary roots? A new study of male rhesus macaques strongly suggests it’s evolution. “The similarity of our results with those in humans suggests that avoiding red or acting submissively in its presence may stem from an inherited psychological predisposition,” says Dartmouth College neuroscientist Jerald D.
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Depressed People Find It Hard to Stop Reliving Bad Times
U.S. News & World Report: A new study suggests that depressed people suffer from an inability to rid themselves of negative thoughts because they can't turn their attention to other things. "They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again," said study co-author Jutta Joormann of the University of Miami in an Association for Psychological Science news release. "Even though they think, 'Oh, it's not helpful, I should stop thinking about this, I should get on with my life,' they can't stop doing it." Read more: U.S. News & World Report
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The Case for Financial Procrastination
TIME: In our first TIME Moneyland post, we explore an issue we’ll return to a lot: the effect of framing and state of mind on financial choice. Framing is one of the aces in the deck of cards that make up behavioral economics; and state of mind powerfully influences how we frame our financial decisions. It’s ironic that people generally consider many factors when making financial decisions but rarely give enough weight to their own state of mind and body. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that how we’re feeling — literally, how we physically feel at a given moment — can affect our decisions about all sorts of issues, including those that have nothing to with those feelings.
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A brain training exercise that really does work
University of Michigan: ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Forget about working crossword puzzles and listening to Mozart. If you want to improve your ability to reason and solve new problems, just take a few minutes every day to do a maddening little exercise called n-back training.
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CEPEDA: Now whites are feeling discrimination
The Sacramento Bee: Scholars from the Harvard Business School and Tufts University's department of psychology recently confirmed the obvious in contemporary American race relations. The title of their report, "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing," pretty much says it all. Published late last month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the report by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers says whites believe that as bias against blacks decreased in the last six decades, intentional discrimination against whites has increased. Whites now see anti-white bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-black bias.
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Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas
The New York Times: Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache. Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to match graphs to equations, dozens upon dozens of them, and fast, often before he has time to work out the correct answer. An equation appears on the screen, and below it three graphs (or vice versa, a graph with three equations).
