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Breast-feeding makes new mothers mama bears
msnbc: Everyone knows not to get between a bear and her cubs, but if mama bears used bottles maybe they’d be a little more mellow. A study published in the September issue of Psychological Science found that nursing mothers are roughly twice as aggressive as bottle-feeding moms and women without children when confronted by a threat. “Maternal defense does not involve nursing mothers going out and looking for bar fights, but when they have a helpless baby, they’re more likely to defend themselves when the fight comes to them,” said Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Department of Health Psychology. Read the full story: msnbc
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Following the Crowd: Changing Your Mind to Fit In May Not Be a Conscious Choice
Scientific American: Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder—it is also in the eyes of the beholder’s friends. A study published in April in Psychological Science found that men judge a woman as more attractive when they believe their peers find that woman attractive—supporting a budding theory that groupthink is not as simple as once thought. Researchers at Harvard University asked 14 college-age men to rate the attractiveness of 180 female faces on a scale of 1 to 10. Thirty minutes later the psychologists asked the men to rate the faces again, but this time the faces were paired with a random rating that the scientists told the men were averages of their peers’ scores.
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Reading fiction ‘improves empathy’, study finds
The Guardian: Burying your head in a novel isn't just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities. A trip into the world of Stephenie Meyer, for example, actually makes us feel like vampires. Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer's Twilight or JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to read, with the vampire group delving into an extract in which Edward Cullen tells his teenage love interest Bella what it is like to be a vampire, and the wizardly readers getting a section in which Harry and his cohorts are "sorted" into Hogwarts houses.
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Managing The Psychological Bias Against Creativity
Forbes: You come up with a great new idea at work, or at home. Or a political leader actually tries something “new and different” when faced with a previously intractable problem. But then, rather than grateful acceptance, or even a fair hearing, the idea is squashed, ridiculed, or otherwise ignored. Sound familiar? It should. As anyone who has ever suggested a creative solution knows, people often avoid the uncomfortable uncertainty of novel solutions regardless of potential benefit.
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Researchers Find That Wisdom Really Does Come With Age
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The adage “with age comes wisdom” may actually ring true, according to psychologists at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin. By examining how aging affects decision-making, researchers concluded that older adults use the experience in decision-making accumulated over their lifetime to determine the long-term utility and not just the immediate benefit before making a choice. However, younger adults tend to focus their decision-making on instant gratification, says Darrell Worthy, a professor of psychology at Texas A&M.
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Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It
New York Times: There is, perhaps, no more uplifting musical experience than hearing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” performed in a perfect space. Many critics regard Symphony Hall in Boston — 70 feet wide, 120 feet long and 65 feet high — as just that space. Some 3,000 miles away, however, a visitor led into the pitch-blackness of Chris Kyriakakis’s audio lab at the University of Southern California to hear a recording of the performance would have no way to know how big the room was. At first it sounded like elegant music played in the parlor on good equipment. Nothing special.
