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Buff Your Brain
The Daily Beast: Brain training to sharpen memory. Aerobic exercise to preserve gray matter. Meditation to hone connections between reason and emotion. It all sounds great, but there’s something that has long bothered us about the growing number of studies pinpointing ways to buff your brain: they don’t go far enough. Sure, exercises to improve memory are better for your brain than, say, watching reality TV, but the most you’re going to gain is more reliable access to knowledge already scattered around your cerebral cortex.
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The Perils of ‘Bite-Sized Science’
The Wall Street Journal: When I wrote, not long ago, about recent debates over possible flaws in the statistical methods used by academic psychologists* — or sloppy application of sound methods — I quoted one young researcher who said that short, punchy academic articles were more likely to be flawed than longer, more-comprehensive articles. That’s because the longer articles poke and prod findings from different angles, in perhaps a half-dozen different experiments (rather than two or three). This leads to less-readable work, frankly, and work that’s harder to boil down into a quick news item.
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The Language of Lies
The Huffington Post: It turns out to be difficult to tell when other people are lying. There are lots of cues that we believe will tip us off to whether someone is telling the truth. We expect people telling the truth to be more confident, to look us in the eye when they talk, and to speak more fluently. But, these cues aren't really reliable indicators of truth telling. Someone might be uncomfortable talking about a topic and look away from you, yet still be telling you the absolute truth. A nice set of studies by Tom Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Medvec in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998 made this point.
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Men, women really do have big personality differences
Today: If men and women at times seem to be from different planets, it may be because there are large differences in their personalities, a new study suggests. The results show that about 18 percent of women share similar personalities with men, and 18 percent of men share similar personalities with women. But the majority of women have personality traits that are quite distinct from those of men, and vice versa, the researchers say. Men tend to be more dominant (forceful and aggressive) and emotionally stable, while women tend to be more sensitive, warm (attentive to others) and apprehensive, the study found. Read the whole story: Today See Janet Hyde at the 24th APS Annual Convention
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The Map in Our Head
The Wall Street Journal: When you’re strolling in your home city, and you see someone with pull out a map, you can be pretty sure you’re looking at a tourist. But a new study suggests that a map-like spatial orientation is layered on top of people’s understanding of even highly familiar places. In other words, you may not have a map stashed in a fanny pack, but you can’t escape the way of looking at the world that maps tutor us in. From a new study in Psychological Science: "We examined how a highly familiar environmental space—one’s city of residence—is represented in memory.
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Writing Meaningful Thoughts is Akin to Weight Loss Exercises: Study
International Business Times: It could be that the act of writing down values and beliefs is the next big fat-buster, as part of a mental diet strategy. A Canadian study suggests value affirmation as a psychological step towards weight-loss initiatives. According to the study, the intervention for effective weight loss is possible by writing down thoughts about one's self-defining values. The research, published in Psychological Science - a journal of the Association for Psychological Science - stated that women who wrote about their most important values (like notes on close relationships, music or religion) lost more weight over the following few months than women who did not.
