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What You Farm Affects Your Thinking, Study Says
National Geographic: That is the result of a study published Thursday in Science comparing people from different parts of China. Researchers led by Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, found that people from rice-growing regions think in more interdependent and holistic ways than do those from wheat-growing areas. Talhelm thinks these differences arose because it takes much more cooperation and overall effort to grow rice than wheat. To successfully plant and harvest rice, farmers must work together to build complex irrigation systems and set up labor exchanges. Over time, this need for teamwork fosters an interdependent and collectivist psychology.
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The Science of Peak Human Performance
TIME: The science of ultimate human performance has a bad name–literally. “Flow” is the term used by researchers for optimal states of consciousness, those peak moments of total absorption where self vanishes, time flies, and all aspects of performance go through the roof. Yet, it was University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who selected this term, and he did so for a reason. In the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi embarked upon what would soon become one of the largest psychological surveys ever, running around the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best. Read the whole story: TIME
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Denn wir wissen nicht, was wir sagen (For we know not what we say)
Süddeutsche Zeitung: Wenn wir einen Satz sagen wollen, geht diesem im Idealfall ein Gedankenprozess voraus. Diese Gedanken wandelt unser Gehirn in Sprache um und anschließend kommen mehr oder weniger kluge Sätze aus unseren Mündern. Es gibt aber auch Forscher, die behaupten, dass Sprache nicht immer "geplant" wird - und dass Menschen zum Teil erst wissen, was sie reden, wenn sie sich sprechen hören. Folgt man diesem Ansatz, dann könnte man sie recht einfach davon überzeugen, etwas völlig anderes gesagt zu haben, als sie tatsächlich von sich gegeben haben.
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Will the Great Recession Spawn Humble CEOs?
For years, social scientists have been interested in narcissism among America’s corporate titans. Narcissistic CEOs are known for their self-promotion, excessive self-regard, and tendency to draw attention to themselves. They also tend to embrace risk and lead companies that either perform fantastically well or catastrophically poorly. One signal of a narcissistic CEO is relative pay. Narcissistic CEOs pay themselves considerably more than other members of their top management team. CEOs have some control over their own pay and almost complete control over the pay of other executives.
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Mothers’ Symptoms of Depression Predict How They Respond to Child Behavior
Depressive symptoms seem to focus mothers' responses on minimizing their own distress, which may come at the expense of focusing on the impact their responses have on their children, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Depressive symptoms are common among mothers, and these symptoms are linked with worse developmental outcomes for children. The new study, which followed 319 mothers and their children over a two-year period, helps to explain why parenting competence seems to deteriorate as parents' symptoms of depression increase.
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Multitask Masters
The New Yorker: In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone.
