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I’m sorry. I’ve changed. I promise. Really.
It was excruciating to watch Anthony Weiner, the New York lawmaker, making public amends this week for tweeting lewd photos of himself to a young woman he didn’t even know. He was clearly mortified—at least his taut jaw and flat expression suggested that he was. But politicians are practiced at sending non-verbal messages, and Weiner was no doubt using every tool in his kit. Maybe he was just chagrined and upset at getting caught in such a foolish stunt. He hasn’t won my trust back yet, and I’m guessing that others feel this way as well. Trust recovery—apologizing, promising change, insisting we’ve changed—is tricky business.
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Virginity and Promiscuity: Evidence For the Very First Time
True Love Waits is a virginity pledge program, probably the largest of its kind. Started by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1993, it now claims more than 2.5 million members, teenagers and young adults who have promised to remain sexually “pure” until marriage. Many other virginity pledge programs have sprouted up since the ‘90s, and what’s more, state lawmakers have jumped on the abstinence bandwagon. Thirty-four states now require that abstinence be taught or emphasized in the school curricula, while only 15 mandate instruction in contraception.
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Stop On Red! The Effects of Color May Lie Deep in Evolution…
Almost universally, red means stop. Red means danger. Red means hot. And analyzing the results in the 2004 Olympics, researchers have found that red also means dominance. Athletes wearing red prevailed more often than those wearing blue, especially in hand-to-hand sports like wrestling. Why? Is it random? Is it cultural? Or does it have evolutionary roots? A new study of male rhesus macaques strongly suggests it’s evolution. “The similarity of our results with those in humans suggests that avoiding red or acting submissively in its presence may stem from an inherited psychological predisposition,” says Dartmouth College neuroscientist Jerald D.
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Depressed People Find It Hard to Stop Reliving Bad Times
U.S. News & World Report: A new study suggests that depressed people suffer from an inability to rid themselves of negative thoughts because they can't turn their attention to other things. "They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again," said study co-author Jutta Joormann of the University of Miami in an Association for Psychological Science news release. "Even though they think, 'Oh, it's not helpful, I should stop thinking about this, I should get on with my life,' they can't stop doing it." Read more: U.S. News & World Report
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The Case for Financial Procrastination
TIME: In our first TIME Moneyland post, we explore an issue we’ll return to a lot: the effect of framing and state of mind on financial choice. Framing is one of the aces in the deck of cards that make up behavioral economics; and state of mind powerfully influences how we frame our financial decisions. It’s ironic that people generally consider many factors when making financial decisions but rarely give enough weight to their own state of mind and body. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that how we’re feeling — literally, how we physically feel at a given moment — can affect our decisions about all sorts of issues, including those that have nothing to with those feelings.
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A brain training exercise that really does work
University of Michigan: ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Forget about working crossword puzzles and listening to Mozart. If you want to improve your ability to reason and solve new problems, just take a few minutes every day to do a maddening little exercise called n-back training.
