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New Republic: Let Them Eat Cake Or Don’t Bake At All
NPR: Flannery O'Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. "Free will does not mean one will," she wrote, "but many wills conflicting in one man." The existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be without inner debate? We're torn between staying faithful and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can't resist the red velvet cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on impulse, even though we know we'll need the money for other things. Everyone is aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them?
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Too much coffee and stress can lead to hallucinations, La Trobe University study warns
Herald Sun: A La Trobe University study has found stressed people who have consumed five cups of coffee can exhibit signs of hallucination. Professor Simon Crowe from the School of Psychological Sciences examined the effect of stress and caffeine on 92 participants. Prof Crowe found stressed people who had consumed about 200mg of caffeine during the day were more likely to imagine hearing things. "What we did is we brought people into the lab while listening to White Christmas and then told them we were going to play some white noise," he told mX. Read more: Herald Sun
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Both mind and body play key role in problem solving
Yahoo India: A new study has confirmed that not only the brain, but other body parts also play a significant role in problem solving. "Being able to use your body in problem solving alters the way you solve the problems," said Martha Alibali, psychology professor at University of Wisconsin. "Body movements are one of the resources we bring to cognitive processes," she added. To confirm their findings, researchers recruited 86 American undergraduates, half of whom were prevented from moving their hands and the others were prevented from moving their feet. Read more: Yahoo India
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News in Brief: Association for Psychological Science meeting
ScienceNews: Familiarity breeds congeniality Snap judgments about others sometimes depend not on what the person looks like but on whom they look like. Women tend to preferentially like male strangers who facially resemble the woman’s romantic partner, psychologist Gül Günaydin of Cornell University reported May 27. This type of social attraction often occurs unconsciously, Günaydin’s team found. For unclear reasons, men showed no signs of especially liking women who resembled a romantic partner. Members of 30 romantic couples observed opposite-sex strangers’ faces for half a second on a computer screen. Some faces were digitally altered to resemble the volunteers’ partners.
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El ejercicio mental que de verdad aumenta la inteligencia
ABC Espana: Ni autodefinidos, ni sudokus, ni música de Mozart ni lo último en complicados juegos electrónicos. La mejor manera de entrenar nuestro cerebro para aumentar realmente nuestra inteligencia es un pequeño ejercicio llamado «entrenamiento n-back», según concluye un estudio de la Universidad de Michigan. Básicamente, la tarea consiste en recordar las posiciones de una figura que se mueve de forma cíclica en una pantalla, y los investigadores aseguran que su práctica 20 minutos diarios durante 20 días mejora los resultados en una prueba de inteligencia. Al parecer, aumenta la capacidad de razonar y de resolver nuevos problemas, una mejoría que se prolonga al menos durante tres meses.
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Depression and Negative Thoughts
We all have our ups and downs—a fight with a friend, a divorce, the loss of a parent. But most of us get over it. Only some go on to develop major depression. Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests part of the reason may be that people with depression get stuck on bad thoughts because they’re unable to turn their attention away. People who don’t recover from negative events seem to keep going over their troubles. “They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again,” says Jutta Joormann, of the University of Miami.
