-
In Hard Times, an Instinct to Pack on Pounds
The Wall Street Journal: When times are tough, people make like bears getting ready to hibernate: they eat more and prefer higher calorie foods. That’s the implication of a new paper reporting that, in an experiment involving M&Ms, people faced with messages about hard times ate way more than people surrounded by neutral messages. The paper actually describes three experiments exploring how humans adjust their eating when unconsciously “primed” with words such as adversity, struggle and survival. Researchers found that the perception of hard times prompts people to live more for the moment, let tomorrow take care of itself, and stoke up against an uncertain future.
-
Lance Armstrong’s lies not so different from our own
The Washington Post: Lance Armstrong may have been branded liar and cheat of the month, but experts say he’s not as different from the rest of us as we’d like to believe. Lying, they say, is part of the human condition, something most people do every day. And that’s reflected in the cavalcade of celebrities cowed into confession after their deceptions were exposed — from Richard Nixon’s denial of the Watergate break-in to Bill Clinton’s denial of an affair with an intern, from drug-abusing baseball players to fraudulent Wall Street executives.
-
Diet, Parental Behavior, and Preschool Can Boost Children’s IQ
Supplementing children’s diets with fish oil, enrolling them in quality preschool, and engaging them in interactive reading all turn out to be effective ways to raise a young child’s intelligence, according to a new report published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using a technique called meta-analysis, a team led by John Protzko, a doctoral student at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, combined the findings from existing studies to evaluate the overall effectiveness of each type of intervention.
-
When Is it Good to Have a Few Close Friends?
The Huffington Post: Look at your life. Do you have friends? What kind of friends do you have? Have you got a few people in your life that you spend a lot of time with? Have you got a larger number of acquaintances that you see on occasion? Which is better? I often ponder this question when watching movies. In lots of movies, there is a couple at the center of the action. The husband may hang out with his buddies bowling, and later the wife has her weekly lunch with a college friend. These scenes make sense dramatically, and they fit with a cultural belief that the path to happiness lies in having close friends. How important is it for people to have a few close friends?
-
Claims of ‘post-racial’ society and other denials of racism may reflect ignorance of history
Asian News International: New research has suggested that commonly observed differences in how groups perceive racism may be explained by ignorance about, and even denial of, the extent of racism over the course of history. The research, conducted by psychological scientists at the University of Kansas and Texas A and M University, indicates that African Americans had more accurate knowledge of historically documented racism compared to European Americans. This difference in historical knowledge partially accounted for group differences in perceptions of racism, both at a systemic and an incident-specific level. ...
-
How Manti Te’o Could Have Fallen in Love with Someone He Never Met
TIME: In what must be the most jaw-dropping sports story to emerge in a week of jaw-dropping sports stories (hello, OprahLance!), it emerges that star Notre Dame footballer Manti Te’o had a girlfriend who never existed. That would not be much of a tale—who hasn’t had at least one fake dalliance?— except that Te’o, a probable first round pick in the NFL draft in April, became famous when his grandmother and that girlfriend were said to have died in the same 24 hour period in September and he still went out and left nothing on the field for the fighting Irish. ...
