-
Law and Disorder: The Psychology of False Confessions
At 9:45 PM on November 10, 1984, 16-year-old Theresa Fusco finished up her shift at the roller skating rink in the Long Island village of Lynbrook. She never made it home that night. She was reported missing, but nearly a month passed before her body was found, naked, in a wooded area not far from the rink. She had been strangled and covered up with leaves and debris. There was semen in her vagina. Fusco was not the first young woman to disappear in the vicinity, and police were under tremendous public pressure to make an arrest.
-
Liking yourself just the way you are
Los Angeles Times: You know it's tough out there when fashion and beauty executives think that even a model's body isn't good enough to sell clothes or that a celebrity's natural face isn't up to par, even with makeup. The website Jezebel reported in early December that Swedish retailing giant H&M featured images on its website of lingerie shown on "completely virtual" computer-generated bodies with real models' heads superimposed on top. Meanwhile the British Advertising Standards Authority banned two makeup ads in 2011 featuring Christy Turlington and Julia Roberts because they thought too much airbrushing made the ads misleading, and CoverGirl pulled a mascara ad after a U.S.
-
Forget Being Grumpy…We Get Happier With Age
Express UK: Far from turning into grumpy old men and women, people become happier and more positive with age. Mature brains, as they age and lose memories, choose to retain happy ones and see the sunny side of life, according to a study. The over-50s also tended to cut out negative people from their life. Read the full story: Express UK
-
People Mimic Each Other, But We Aren’t Chameleons
It’s easy to pick up on the movements that other people make—scratching your head, crossing your legs. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people only feel the urge to mimic each other when they have the same goal. It’s common for people to pick up on each other’s movements. “This is the notion that when you’re having a conversation with somebody and you don’t care where your hands are, and the other person scratches their head, you scratch your head,” says Sasha Ondobaka of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
-
Searching for the real relationship between money and happiness
The Washington Post: Can money make you happy? An entire quantitative field of study, happiness economics, has grown up around that question. In reading the literature, I came to one inescapable conclusion: Happiness economics makes some academics happy because they can publish conflicting papers that help them earn tenure. Oh, and they’ve boiled down happiness to an equation: Wit = α + βxit + εit. But the real relationship between income and happiness is more nuanced, and measuring people’s true feelings is tricky. For example, when study subjects are asked how happy they think people at different income levels are likely to be, they generally underestimate the happiness of the poor.
-
Impatient? It May Hurt Your Credit Score
Forbes: Your propensity to wait (or not) is also reflected in your credit score, according to a study from researchers at Columbia and Stanford published online in Psychological Science. Patient people tend to have higher credit scores than those who just can’t wait. Participants who were the most willing to wait for the bigger payout had FICO scores that were roughly 30 points higher than those who were least willing to delay, the study found. Those who were the least willing to delay fell below the subprime credit score cutoff of 620, below which people generally pay much higher borrowing costs on credit cards and other loans. Read the full story: Forbes
