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The Final Feast: Last Meals on Death Row
Pacific Standard: What would you eat if you knew it was your last meal? For some people—death-row inmates facing imminent execution—the question is not a hypothetical one. In one of the most morbidly fascinating academic studies to cross my desk in a long time, Brian Wansink of Cornell University compiled a catalog of final food requests from 247 Americans who were facing the death penalty. Among his findings, published in the journal Appetite: “The average last meal is calorically rich (2756 calories) and proportionately averages 2.5 times the daily recommended servings of protein and fat.” Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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Los bilingües recurren a la lengua en la que aprendieron las matemáticas para multiplicar (Bilinguals resort to the language they learned math in to multiply)
ABC Espana: Un estudio realizado por investigadores del Centro Vasco sobre Cognición, Cerebro y Lenguaje (BCBL) revela que las personas bilingües recurren a la lengua en la que aprendieron las matemáticas a la hora de multiplicar, debido a que el lenguaje deja una huella en la memoria durante el aprendizaje. En un comunicado, el BCBL ha indicado que esta investigación, realizada en colaboración con la Universidad de Texas (EEUU) y publicada en la revista científica «Psychological Science», abre la puerta a conocer mejor trastornos del aprendizaje.
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What to test instead
Boston Globe: Breaking down these multifaceted skills into testable qualities is difficult, and it’s something educators have been trying and failing to do for more than half a century. The first president of ETS, which has long administered the SAT, set out in 1948 to develop a test that could evaluate a student’s intellectual stamina, ability to get along with others, and so on—but the company eventually concluded it was too hard to measure in a reliable way. More recently, in the late 1980s and ’90s, the Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner participated in an effort to design new kinds of tests in the humanities that could be graded objectively.
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Our Preferences Change to Reflect the Choices We Make, Even Three Years Later
You’re in a store, trying to choose between similar shirts, one blue and one green. You don’t feel strongly about one over the other, but eventually you decide to buy the green one. You leave the store and a market researcher asks you about your purchase and which shirt you prefer. Chances are that you’d say you prefer the green one, the shirt you actually chose. As it turns out, this choice-induced preference isn’t limited to shirts. Whether we’re choosing between presidential candidates or household objects, research shows that we come to place more value on the options we chose and less value on the options we rejected.
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Why Lies Often Stick Better Than Truth
The Chronicle of Higher Education: There is no good reason to believe vaccines cause autism. A 1998 paper in The Lancet that championed the link was immediately pilloried and later withdrawn as fraudulent. Its author, the British physician Andrew J. Wakefield, was found guilty of dishonesty and abuse of developmentally disabled children by the British General Medical Council. He has been stripped of his medical license. No other researcher has been able to replicate his work, and journals have retracted his other papers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Sciences, and many other groups found no evidence of a link.
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Stress, depression may affect cancer survival
CNN: "A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ," John Steinbeck once wrote. Now we are closer to understanding why. A disease like cancer can be a mortal battle, often fraught with overwhelming stress. Given that stress management can be difficult even under ordinary circumstances, elevated feelings of anxiety and depression in cancer patients are certainly understandable. Yet, several recent studies underscore how critically important it is for those fighting illness to learn how to combat stress.
