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Overworked and Underplayed: The Incredible Shrinking Vacation
Huffington Post: As you trudge back to work after a brief glimpse of freedom beyond the office, your thoughts may turn to what it would feel like to have a few more days off from the grind. The end of May used to mark the unofficial start of vacation season, a time when people took road trips, went camping, roamed amusement parks, traveled and explored their world. Today, vacations are little more than a memory for many of us, a theoretical concept that exists only on paper. Some 25 percent of Americans and 31 percent of low-wage earners get no vacation at all anymore, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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Mind Reading: Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen on Empathy and the Science of Evil
TIME: Cambridge psychology professor and leading autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen is best known for studying the theory that a key problem in autistic disorders is "mind blindness," difficulty understanding the thoughts, feelings and intentions of others. He's also known for positing the "extreme male brain" concept of autism, which suggests that exposure to high levels of testosterone in the womb can cause the brain to focus on systematic knowledge and patterns more than on emotions and connection with others.
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Academics, in New Move, Begin to Work With Wikipedia
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Washington—The call to action was all over the Association for Psychological Science’s annual meeting here this past weekend. “Attention APS Members. Take Charge of Your Science,” fliers shout. Promotional ads in the conference programs urge the society’s 25,000 members to join the APS Wikipedia Initiative and “make sure Wikipedia—the world’s No. 1 online encyclopedia—represents psychology fully and accurately.” And the Wikimedia Foundation, which backs the encyclopedia, was holding editing demonstrations in the middle of the conference exhibit hall. Read more: The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Key to success in dating world lies in your personality
New Kerala: Certain personality traits contribute to being a good judge of whether someone else thinks you're worth meeting again, according to the study. Mitja Back of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz was interested in the question: is there's something about personality that makes some people better at predicting whether others will want to meet them? n 17 groups, a total of 190 men and 192 women met members of the opposite sex—basically the standard speed dating routine, but this time, with psychologists collecting a lot of data.
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Do you speak a second, or third, language?
The New York Times: Cognitive neuroscientist Ellen Bialystok has been studying how being able to speak two languages sharpens the mind. In her conversation with Claudia Dreifus, she states that kids who are bilingual have a way of thinking that helps them better distinguish important information from the less important. Are you or someone you are close to able to speak two (or more) languages fluently? Have you noticed any advantages other than being able to communicate with more people? In the article based on their conversation "The Bilingual Advantage" Ellen Bialystok explains why bilinguals are able to sort information as they do: Read more at: The New York Times
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Symposia Sunday: Messy Morality
Morality is not a universal constant. For example, why would the government of Spain give human rights to chimps in 2007, yet other governments continue to hand out licenses for hunting seal pups? In a symposium today, three researchers discussed their efforts to investigate individual variation in morality. One way to account for differences in morality is genetics. Abigail Marsh, a researcher from Georgetown University, shared her latest results from a study where she and her team correlated genetic alleles for a serotonin transporter called SLC6A4 with participants’ responses to moral scenarios. Participants were asked to respond to dilemmas with various outcomes.
