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Why we can’t stop spending
Canadian Business: The dangerous paradox: Policy-makers have encouraged Canadians to keep spending, while decrying rising debt levels. Read the whole story: Canadian Business
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Full Bladder, Better Decisions? Controlling Your Bladder Decreases Impulsive Choices
What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst—psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women.
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Is That What You Think? My Brain Agrees
Have you caught yourself conforming to your friends’ opinions? A new study published in Psychological Science found conformity to social norms happens even in our brains! When people change their opinions to conform to social norms, the parts of their brains associated with rewards are engaged, giving us added incentive to fit in. Psychological scientists at Harvard University asked male volunteers to rate the attractiveness of 180 digitized female Facebook photos on a scale from 1 to 7. They were then told that many other men had also rated the same photos—some of those “peer” ratings were higher than the participant’s, some were lower, and some were the same.
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Mean Girls: The Science Behind the Silver Screen Hit
No one likes to be excluded, women especially. A study published in Psychological Science found that when females feel a threat of social exclusion, they are more likely than males to respond by forming other cliques and alliances to prevent their own exclusion. To investigate how men and women respond when faced with a social threat, psychological scientist Joyce F. Benenson of Emmanuel College and Harvard University, along with her colleagues, asked volunteers to play a game against two hypothetical partners in which they accumulated points for money.
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More self-aware people quit smoking easier
CNN: How your brain responds to anti-smoking messages may be useful in helping to kick the habit, a new study in the journal Nature Neuroscience reports. "People who are more likely to potentially see the messages as relevant to them, they are more likely to quit," said lead author Hannah Faye Chua of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "They could feel like, 'This is me, this is how I am right now, this is how I would like to change.'" Read the whole story: CNN
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Staring contests automatic among the aggressive
USA Today: Staring contests, that staple of junior high school and bar fights, are indeed linked to dominance behavior and appear to be reflexive. Primates use staring contests instead of fights to resolve dominance issues. Humans do the same -- staring down another person establishes who's on top, socially, in a situation. Sometimes it keeps a fight from happening, sometimes it leads to a fight. Read the whole story: USA Today
