-
Status and Stress
The New York Times: Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills. What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects. That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences.
-
Why “Occupy Wall Street” Fizzled
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street came into existence at roughly the same time, in the wake of the financial markets’ collapse, and each was an angry challenge to the country’s financial and political status quo. But there the similarity ended. The ultra-conservative Tea Party movement focused on tax cuts and smaller government, and it has never veered far from that message. It achieved consensus on these goals early on, and has succeeded in unifying adherents in its congressional caucus and elsewhere. It remains a potent force in American politics today. The liberal Occupy Wall Street, by contrast, focused on . . . well, what exactly?
-
Cibo più gustoso grazie ai rituali (Food is tastier thanks to rituals)
La Stampa: Cappellini, trombette, stelle filanti e canti a squarciagola. Sono questi gli elementi che caratterizzano la buona riuscita di una festa. Quando si tratta di un compleanno, poi, si aggiunge il momento magico dello spegnimento delle candeline – ovviamente con l’immancabile richiesta di desiderio da realizzare entro l’anno a venire. Ma la torta, anche se semplice, assume caratteristiche di maggiore gustosità e dolcezza che non si percepiscono in altri momenti. Il motivo di tutto ciò se so lo sono domandati alcuni ricercatori del Minnesota che hanno dato il via a una serie di studi per comprendere come cambia la valutazione di un cibo a seconda di come lo si mangia.
-
Examining Personal Health Decisions
The Affordable Care Act aims to boost health at the population level by making healthcare affordable and accessible to all. But, even with greater access to healthcare, many aspects of health ultimately rest on individual-level decision making. Two new research articles published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore how people make health-related decisions, and how those decisions aren't always rational. The first article reveals people’s tendency to follow the status quo when making health-related decisions -- even when the status quo is objectively worse.
-
An invisible gorilla in your lungs
The Boston Globe: In a famous experiment, researchers asked people to watch a video of a group passing a basketball and count the number of passes. In the middle of the video, someone in a gorilla suit unexpectedly walks through the group—but many viewers fail to notice the gorilla, because they’re so focused on counting passes. In a new experiment, researchers with Harvard Medical School’s Visual Attention Lab have taken this work on “inattentional blindness” one step further. They asked radiologists to look for nodules in a CT scan of a lung. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
-
Rituals Make Food (and Drinks) Taste Better
TIME: One night as she was enjoying an evening with friends, professor Kathleen Vohs, who teaches marketing at the University of Minnesota, was disappointed to find that the bottle of wine she had bought earlier came with a screw top, not a cork. “I missed the whole ritual of unwrapping the foil and inserting the corkscrew, and feeling that tension,” she says. “It has so many dimensions because I can feel the foil, but everyone else can hear the pop — you know that very satisfying pop.” Because the wine bottle was missing that pop, Vohs and her company agreed that the wine probably wouldn’t be as flavorful.
