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Cranking Up Your Private Pep Rally
The Wall Street Journal: To summon the "calculated explosiveness" he felt he needed to clinch a motorcycle jump at this past summer's X-Games, Travis Pastrana cranked up AC/DC's "For Those About to Rock" before revving his engine. The motocross champion and race driver usually likes country music—nothing overly aggressive—to help him focus ahead of most other extreme-sporting feats. Going with the rock anthem for that jump "obviously hasn't worked out," says Mr. Pastrana, who broke his right foot and ankle when his twisting backflip failed at the Los Angeles event. Such can be the power of music to pump up a person for a performance—sometimes even too much.
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The King of Human Error
Vanity Fair: We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them.
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Greater Performance Improvements When Quick Responses Are Rewarded More Than Accuracy Itself
ScienceBlogs: Last month's Frontiers in Psychology contains a fascinating study by Dambacher, Hübner, and Schlösser in which the authors demonstrate that the promise of financial reward can actually reduce performance when rewards are given for high accuracy. Counterintuitively, performance (characterized as accuracy per unit time) is actually better increased by financial rewards for response speed in particular. The authors demonstrated this surprising result using a flanker task. In Dambacher et al's "parity" version of the flanker, subjects had to determine whether the middle character in strings like "149" or "$6#" were even or odd.
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Lunch break: Experience vs. memory
The Washington Post: Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and one of the founders of behavioral economics, explains in a TED talk how our “experiencing selves” and “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently: Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Understanding Your Mind Is Mission Critical
Scientific American: Earlier this year, Senator Tom Coburn published a report called “Under the Microscope,” in which he criticized the funding of any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important. Of particularly dubious value, in Coburn’s opinion, are the behavioral and social sciences—including my own field, psychology.
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What’s the Skinny on “Fat Talk”?
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Taylor Locker from the University of Florida present her poster session research on “Fat Talk”: Who’s Doing It, Why, and With Whom. Locker and coauthor Kelly Graf interviewed 197 undergraduates—152 women and 45 men—about self-reported use of fat talk, or self-disparaging comments about one’s body to represent and foster body dissatisfaction. Eighty percent of women and approximately half of men were able to recall at least one time in which they explicitly criticized their bodies for being “too fat” or expressed a desire to lose weight.
