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Social Rejection Could Affect Body’s Immune System, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post: We all know that rejection seriously hurts -- and now a new study shows how it could actually be bad for our health. Scientists from the University of British Columbia, Brandeis University and the University of California, Los Angeles have found that social stressors could affect our immune systems. "Targeted rejection is central to some of life's most distressing experiences -- things like getting broken up with, getting fired, and being excluded from your peer group at school," study researcher Michael Murphy said in a statement.
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This column will change your life: selfishness
The Guardian: It's a fairly well-established fact, in political psychology, that leftwingers report lower levels of happiness than rightwingers. (This fact, you may have noticed, is self-reinforcing: learning of it makes leftwingers even gloomier.) What's much less clear is why. Conservatives like to argue that it's because the things they value – traditional families, faith, free markets – make people happiest. Liberals prefer to think conservatives are blinkered, clinging to an ideology that lets them avoid confronting life's grim truths; it's even been proposed that conservatism might be a mental illness.
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How To Get Over Rejection
Prevention: Anyone who’s been rejected—and sadly, who hasn’t—knows how much it, well, sucks. And now new research in the journal Clinical Psychological Science shows that it can also seriously mess with our physical and mental health. Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) found that women who recently experienced an incident of rejection had elevated levels of pro-inflammatory molecules. When activated, these molecules can trigger inflammation, upping the risk for everything from depression and diabetes to cardiovascular disease and cancer.
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Why Your 4-Year-Old Is As Smart as Nate Silver
Slate: Everyone who spends time with children knows how incredibly much they learn. But how can babies and young children possibly learn so much so quickly? In a recent article in Science, I describe a promising new theory about how babies and young children learn and the slew of research that supports it. The idea is that kids learn by thinking like Nate Silver, the polling analyst extraordinaire at the New York Times. I suspect that most people who, like me, obsessively click his FiveThirtyEight blog throughout the day think of Nate as a semi-divine oracle who can tell you whether your electoral prayers will be answered.
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The Psychology of Liberals and Conservatives
Wired: It’s election season in the U.S., and the campaigning between the Democrats and Republicans is fiercer than ever. Now, here at GeekDad, we prefer to steer clear of partisan politics, so this posting is not going to tap-dance into that minefield; instead, we’re going to take a look at the more interesting subject of the psychology of conservative and liberal viewpoints. And regardless of which way you lean politically, I’m pretty sure that once we’re finished, you’ll concede that both the left and the right have perfectly reasonable world views, and that the human mind is an intriguingly subtle organ.
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Should Scientists Promote Results Over Process?
NPR: Consider: two scientists are asked whether there's any doubt that humans are responsible for climate change. The first says, "It's a fact humans are causing climate change – there's no room for doubt." The second replies, "The evidence for anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming, but in science there's always room for doubt." The first scientist is probably a more effective spokesperson for the scientific consensus. But the second scientist is providing a more accurate representation of how science works. This example defines the tension at the boundary between the realms of science and public opinion.
