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Is the Antidote to Embarrassment in a Jar?
The Wall Street Journal: Feeling embarrassed can motivate people to want to save face—literally. A study published in the journal Psychological Science found people recalling embarrassing events tended to want to apply face creams that promise to restore skin. These people also were more likely to want to hide their face with large, dark sunglasses than people not feeling embarrassed. In the study, researchers at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto explored symbolic ways people cope with embarrassment in experiments involving more than 200 Hong Kong students, about 21 years old. Two-thirds were women.
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What Kind Of Stress Eater Are You?
The Huffington Post: What are your eating habits in the face of stress? Do you eat more under duress, or are you the sort of person who loses your appetite? A new study shows that stress eaters tend to eat more when stressed, but actually eat less after a positive experience, while "skippers" -- those who don't eat during stressful moments -- tend to consume more after a positive experience. "These findings challenge the simplistic view that stress eaters need to regulate their eating behavior to prevent weight gain," study researcher Gudrun Sproesser, of the University of Konstanz in Germany, said in a statement.
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Psychological Science Sets New Standards for Research Reporting
The leading journal in psychological science is introducing innovative new guidelines for authors, part of an effort to strengthen the reporting and analysis of findings in psychological research. The new author guidelines for the journal Psychological Science are among several related initiatives that researchers, led by the Association for Psychological Science, are undertaking to promote the replicability of scientific studies and the use of sound research practices across all areas of the field.
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When Praise Hurts: The Psychology Of Gushing
Search the Internet for “101 Ways to Praise a Child” and you’ll find a poster--actually many variations of a single poster. Some are available to download, or if you want quantities, you can purchase the posters from a discount school supply house, laminated if you choose. Some are simple black-and-white typography, while others have bright, four-color, illustrated borders. They are available for classroom teachers, for speech and language therapists, for drug educators—and of course for parents. I don’t know the precise origins of the “101 Ways to Praise a Child” poster, but it was no doubt a product of the self-esteem movement that began to sweep the nation’s schools in the ‘90s.
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Sleep Unbinds Memories From Their Emotional Context
Many of us might remember our parents insisting that we get a good night’s sleep before a big exam or test, with the argument that being well rested would help us perform at our best. Although we may not have believed our parents back then, perhaps we should have. Research is showing that sleep plays an important role in the stabilization and strengthening of memories. In particular, research has shown that sleep makes memories more resistant to interference from competing lexical information. The authors of a recent article in the journal Cortex wondered if sleep could also protect memories from emotional interference.
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‘I Shall Wear The Bottoms of My Trousers Rolled’
The Huffington Post: What do those words evoke for you? For me, because I still have fragments of T.S. Eliot's poetry bouncing around my neurons, those lyrical words trigger the idea of growing old, with all its associated aches and pains and slowing down. Other words might do the same for you -- Florida, lonely, RV, Social Security -- depending on your experiences. Mere words have the power to shape our thinking and our judgments in hidden ways every day. And not just our thinking -- our actions as well.
