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Your Name Impacts How Others Judge You
LiveScience: Alexandra will get an A in class but Amber won't. At least, that's what their peers expect, according to a small new study of the meanings encoded in people's names. "The name you give your kid is sort of a proxy for a whole bunch of things in our culture," study researcher John Waggoner of Bloomberg University of Pennsylvania told LiveScience. Names have been linked to many life choices, including what kind of work people do and how they donate to charity. Previous studies have shown that what people name their children varies by their socioeconomic status and education level. Waggoner and his colleagues wondered if people's names affect what others expect of them.
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Is It Hot Outside? You Might Be More Likely to Believe in Global Warming
TIME: A study recently published in Psychological Science suggests that daily weather dictates climate change opinion, indicating that "irrelevant environmental information, such as the current weather, can affect judgments." Researchers from the Columbia University Center for Decision Sciences asked residents in the United States and Australia to detail their climate change opinions and report whether the day's temperature was warmer or colder than usual. They found that "respondents who thought that day was warmer than usual believed more in and had greater concern about global warming than respondents who thought that day was colder than usual.
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Disbelieving Free Will Makes Brain Less Free
WIRED: If people are told that free will doesn’t exist, their brains might follow suit. A test of people who read passages discrediting the notion of free will found an immediate decrease in brain activity related to voluntary action. The findings are just one data point in ongoing scientific investigation of a millennia-old philosophical conundrum, but they raise an intriguing possibility. “Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,” wrote researchers led by psychologist Davide Rigoni of Italy’s University of Padova in a study published in May’s Psychological Science. Read the whole story: WIRED
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Advice for Online Daters: If You’re a Guy, Don’t Smile
TIME: Men, if you're trying to lure the ladies with a photograph, make like James Dean and brood. Women are turned off by guys who smile, according to a new study published in the American Psychological Association's journal Emotion. Men, however, were most attracted to photos of smiling women, the study found. And both men and women said they were attracted to people with a look of shame. The findings may have something to say about how non-verbal cues like posture and expression affect initial sexual attraction in both genders. Read more: TIME
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The dark side of happiness
Irish Medical Times: I knew it all along. Happiness kills. A study of traits in children which may lead to longer or shorter lives is quite conclusive in its findings: happy, cheerful youngsters are doomed to an early grave (see article in latest Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 18, 2011, vol. 6 no. 3 222-233 (doi: 10.1177/1745691611406927). The results are surprising — to some people at least. Not to me and other lifelong dysfunctionals. Remarks in a school report which state that the brat in question is ‘very cheery’ or ‘very cheerful’ or ‘happy’ are the kiss of death. Read more at : Irish Medical Times
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A Time to Kill
Science: A runaway trolley is about to kill five railroad workers. The only way to stop it is to shove a huge man next to you onto the tracks. Would you kill that man to save five? That is one of the standard moral dilemmas that scientists are using to study how people decide between right and wrong. But is it the best example? When was the last time you faced a runaway trolley? To see how people deal with more realistic choices, Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard University, and his undergraduate student Katie Ransohoff, turned to medicine and public health. Read the whole story: Science
