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Can’t Stand Your Commute? It’s All in Your Head.
The Wall Street Journal: Hate your morning commute? There is no need to move, or switch jobs. A recent study suggests an easy way to turn that lost time into found opportunity. The Wall Street Journal spoke with one of the authors of the working paper, Jon M. Jachimowicz, a doctoral student at Columbia Business School, about the study’s findings and how morning attitude adjustments can help with careers and commutes. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Loneliness is an essential human feeling that rises and falls throughout our lives
Vox: Loneliness is epidemic, and in the coming years it could explode. Forty percent of people age 65 and older report being lonely at times. And the percentage of people living alone has been rising steadily since the 1960s. Look at this GIF of how America will age until 2050. It's a wave of increasing old age, but it may also represent a soul-crushing wave of loneliness as baby boomers age into their 70s. ... "What studies also show is that [loneliness] has real physiological consequences," says Maike Luhmann, a psychologist at the University of Cologne in Germany. "Blood pressure goes up, and it can go up permanently.
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Four easy tricks to make your memory work harder for you
The Washington Post: It’s pretty amazing that the same brain that stores our favorite moments, the names and faces of our loved ones, and what our favorite foods taste like can also make room for cocktail chatter, PowerPoint presentations and whatever your boss’s dog’s name is. Keeping memory sharp is key for life. Recent studies have shed light on some surprisingly simple ways for ramping up your recall. ...
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Is Gossip Good at Work?
Talking about co-workers or bosses while they’re not around can be nefarious, but new research suggests that gossip also can have positive effects on group behavior and cooperation at work. Psychological scientists Junhui Wu and Paul A. M. Van Lange of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Daniel Balliet of Wesleyan University compared the effects of gossip and punishment on group behavior in a computer-based experiment. According to Wu and colleagues, knowing that their reputation is on the line tends to make people more cooperative.
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Infants Learn Better When Listening to Human Speech—or Lemurs
Pacific Standard: Babies are born knowing very little about the world or what to pay attention to—they’re not blank slates, but they’re not exactly full ones either. A good example is faces: When they’re just out of the womb, infants will pay about equal attention to human faces as they would to other primates’ faces. Over time, babies learn to look more at humans. Why is that? Is there something innate to us that eventually draws our attention to our fellow human beings. ... The new research, from Northwestern University psychologists Danielle Perszyk and Sandra Waxman, builds on a series of experiments in the last few years that’s investigated the role of speech in cognitive development.
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A clever tweak to how apples are sold is making everyone eat more of them
The Washington Post: Three years ago, a group of researchers at Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab had a hunch. They knew that many of apples being served to kids as part of the National School Lunch Program were ending up in the trash, virtually untouched. But unlike others, they wondered if the reason was more complicated than simply that the kids didn't want the fruit. Specifically, they thought the fact that the apples were being served whole, rather than sliced, was doing the fruits no favor. And they were on to something. A pilot study conducted at eight schools found that fruit consumption jumped by more than 60 percent when apples were served sliced.
