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Knock On Wood? Certain Superstitious Actions Make Us Feel Better, Study Shows
Huffington Post: Knocking on wood may not actually prevent a bad thing from happening, but it does do a good job of lessening our elevated fears, a new study shows. And interestingly enough, superstitious actions like knocking on wood aren't all alike at quelling fears, found researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "Our findings suggest that not all actions to undo a jinx are equally effective.
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Does Diversity Undermine Community Trust?
Research suggests that meaningful day-to-day personal contact might mitigate the ‘hunkering down’ mentality that arises when communities become more diverse.
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Study Finds Most Drug Commercials Misleading
Scientific American: “Don’t Rasp Your Throat With Harsh Irritants, Reach for a LUCKY instead,” reads one Lucky Strike Cigarettes ad from the 1930s. It’s almost beyond belief today that a cigarette company could get away with an ad touting its product as beneficial for the throat, but according to a new study, the days of false and misleading commercials are far from over. Researchers at Dartmouth College, in N.H., and the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to check up on what drug companies say in their U.S. TV commercials. Their findings suggest a frequent disregard for the truth.
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The Meanings of Life
Aeon Magazine: Parents often say: ‘I just want my children to be happy.’ It is unusual to hear: ‘I just want my children’s lives to be meaningful,’ yet that’s what most of us seem to want for ourselves. We fear meaninglessness. We fret about the ‘nihilism’ of this or that aspect of our culture. When we lose a sense of meaning, we get depressed. What is this thing we call meaning, and why might we need it so badly? Let’s start with the last question. To be sure, happiness and meaningfulness frequently overlap. Perhaps some degree of meaning is a prerequisite for happiness, a necessary but insufficient condition.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Genes for Emotion-Enhanced Remembering Are Linked to Enhanced Perceiving Rebecca M. Todd, Daniel J. Müller, Daniel H. Lee, Amanda Robertson, Tayler Eaton, Natalie Freeman, Daniela J. Palombo, Brian Levine, and Adam K. Anderson A deletion variant of the ADRA2B gene has been linked to emotional enhancement of memory and susceptibility to traumatic memories. The authors investigated whether this gene variant is also related to affective biases, particularly for negative stimuli. Participants were genotyped for the ADRA2B gene and took part in an attentional-blink task that contained positive, negative, and neutral words.
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MacArthur fellow Angela Duckworth: Test kids’ grit, not just their IQ
The Washington Post: Think smarts are all you need to succeed in school? Think again, says Angela Duckworth, a research psychologist and one of the recent MacArthur Foundation fellows. In her research, Duckworth examines two traits that predict success: grit, the tendency to sustain interest and effort in pursuing long-term goals, and self control, the regulation of behavioral, emotional and attentional impulses. To Duckworth, grit allows people to pursue challenges over the course of years. Self control, on the other hand, helps us battle “hourly temptations.” Duckworth gave a TEDTalk on grit in which she stressed the importance of determination in academic achievement.
