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Study: ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ distracts you from real life
USA Today: “Who curls their hair and takes a selfie stick to go for a hike in the park?” one of my friends incredulously asked me this weekend. Apparently, one of our mutual acquaintances was so committed to “pics or it didn’t happen” that she decided that lugging a selfie stick on a nature walk was worth the photo op. This pressure to photograph everything we do (and post those photos to social media) is common among young adults, especially college students. After all, Instagram is the third most popular social network among college students after Facebook and Twitter. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Child advocacy groups say YouTube Kids rife with ‘inappropriate’ videos
NBC News: The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy on Tuesday stepped up their criticism of the site, saying it is "rife" with content unsuitable for children.
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A question of etiquette: do you hold the door for others?
The Guardian: Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University. No, they say. Nothing simple about it. Santamaria and Rosenbaum worked to pursue the answer through a tangle of belief, logic, probability, perception and calculation. Their study, Etiquette and Effort: Holding Doors for Others, was published in 2011 in the journal Psychological Science. It is, one way or another, a gripping read. Santamaria and Rosenbaum selected a door that gets heavy use by people entering or exiting a building.
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Humblebrags Aren’t Making People Happy For You
Futurity: The “humblebrag” and other forms of self-promotion often backfire, a new study finds. The researchers wanted to find out why so many people frequently get the trade-off between self-promotion and modesty wrong. They found that self-promoters overestimate how much their self-promotion elicits positive emotions and underestimate how much it elicits negative emotions. As a consequence, when people try to increase the favorability of the opinion others have of them, they excessively self-promote, which has the opposite of the intended effect. Read the whole story: Futurity
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Sophie Scott and the Science of Laughter
The Wall Street Journal: The first time that the neuroscientist Sophie Scott performed standup comedy, in 2010, she did it out of professional jealousy. One of her colleagues at University College London had done his own amateur routine at a new comedy club and was bragging about how good he’d been. As one of the world’s leading researchers on laughter, Dr. Scott, 48, decided that she had to try it herself. At the pub where she made her debut, she locked herself in the restroom and wondered, “What am I doing? Why would I put myself through this needless level of stress?” Once she got on stage, though, she was hooked.
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Why Do We Experience Awe?
The New York Times: HERE’S a curious fact about goose bumps. In many nonhuman mammals, goose bumps — that physiological reaction in which the muscles surrounding hair follicles contract — occur when individuals, along with other members of their species, face a threat. We humans, by contrast, can get goose bumps when we experience awe, that often-positive feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world. Why do humans experience awe? Years ago, one of us, Professor Keltner, argued (along with the psychologist Jonathan Haidt) that awe is the ultimate “collective” emotion, for it motivates people to do things that enhance the greater good.
