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Peace in our time?
The Daily Mail: Hear the good news! ‘We are living in the most peaceable era of our species’ existence!’ Well, you could have fooled me. Who says so? And why? The herald of reassurance is professor Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist with impressive books to his credit on how our minds work. He draws his conclusion - that human violence has declined amazingly, is still declining and may be on the way out - from a 700-page survey of the subject, packed with statistics, table after table and graph after graph. The professor writes as though he knows that I am not going to believe him.
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Con la suerte de tu lado
Yahoo News Argentina: Recuerdo que cuando iba en preparatoria tuve las clases más difíciles de mi vida: cálculo diferencial, geometría analítica y química orgánica. En ese entonces tendría diecisiete años y tres objetos "de la suerte" que me acompañaban en los días de exámenes, mi lápiz de la suerte, una estampita de la virgen de Guadalupe y unos aretes horribles pero muy poderosos, según yo. Sin ellos, no podía entrar al examen, simplemente me paralizaba de nervios. Mis objetos de la suerte han ido cambiando con el paso del tiempo.
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Explained: Why Men Have a Harder Time Making Friends
The Huffington post: In my college course on the science of well-being, I devote at least three classes to what psychologists have learned about nourishing healthy relationships. Ask school children who their friends are and many list last names close to them in the alphabet. Why? Because most friendships are determined by seating charts. Schools shove future friends in your face. During the innocence of youth, proximity alone is grounds for liking someone. But things change dramatically as we get older, especially for men. Open-mindedness takes a hit. What other people think of us and where we stand in the social hierarchy is of epic importance.
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Men quickest to say ‘I love you’
The Telegraph: Previous research indicated that women are more expressive about how they feel - and tend to be ones who fall in love first. The reality, according to the latest findings by psychologist Marissa Harrison, from Pennsylvania State University in the US, is that women are actually more circumspect than men when it comes to romance. The study, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, showed men were more likely to fall in love within a few weeks, while most women said it took several months. Men were also more inclined to tell their partner they loved them much sooner in the relationship. Read the whole story: The Telegraph
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Intellectual Curiosity Predicts Academic Success, Study Finds
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Intellectual curiosity is a strong predictor of future academic performance, says an article in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. That conclusion was based on a meta-analysis of 200 previous studies of students who rated their own intellectual curiosity, among other factors. Intellectual curiosity has as large an effect on academic performance as conscientiousness, though not as much as intelligence, the article says. That finding lends credence to the idea that “a ‘hungry mind’ is a core determinant of individual differences in academic achievement,” write Sophie von Stumm of the University of Edinburgh and two co-authors.
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Psychologists’ Golf Trick Shows Superstition Boosts Performance
WIRED: How can you make people better at sports? Tell them they’re using equipment that previously belonged to a professional athlete. No, really. A new study finds that golfers significantly improved their putting ability when they believed the putter they were using belonged to a celebrity golfer.
