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Would Judge Give Psychopath With Genetic Defect Lighter Sentence?
NPR: In 1991, a man named Stephen Mobley robbed a Domino's pizza in Hall County, Ga., and shot the restaurant manager dead. Crimes like this happen all the time, but this particular case became a national story, in part because Mobley seemed so proud of his crime. After the robbery, he bragged about the killing and had the Domino's logo tattooed on his back. But there was another reason Mobley's case became famous. Right around the time Mobley went to trial, a study was published in a scientific journal about an extremely interesting gene called MAOA: monoamine oxidase A.
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Book review: ‘The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty ’ by Dan Ariely
The Washington Post: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely is a funny guy on a mission. As director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, he insists on a commitment to absurdity, but there is nothing cynical about his approach to human behavior. In his previous book, “Predictably Irrational,” Ariely exposed our false assumptions about the rationality of markets and individuals with plenty of surprising and humorous examples. Our irrationality may be very predictable, but our ability to forecast this behavior doesn’t alter the conditions that give rise to it.
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The Biological Response to Beauty and Ugliness in Art [Excerpt]
Scientific American: Our attraction to faces, and particularly to eyes, appears to be innately determined. Infants as well as adults prefer to look at eyes rather than other features of a person’s face, and both infants and adults are sensitive to gaze. The direction of a person’s gaze is very important in our processing of the emotions displayed by that person’s face, because the brain combines information from gaze with information from facial expressions.
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Major League Baseball Copes With Climate Change
The Huffington Post: On June 30, Washington Nationals ace Stephen Strasburg had his shortest outing of the season, lasting only three innings against the Atlanta Braves at Turner Field. What knocked him out of the box? Record-breaking heat. The 24-year-old All Star pitcher had prepared by drinking copious amounts of water the night before. He retreated to the air-conditioned clubhouse between innings. No matter. The temperature at 4 p.m. game time that Saturday afternoon was 104 degrees, the official high that day was 106 -- the hottest in Atlanta's history -- and by the fourth inning the temperature on the field was around 120. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Health gem
The Irish Times: If you do one thing this week . . . take a wakeful rest after learning Could taking a wakeful rest after learning help memory? Experiments where people were asked to remember prose suggest that it could. In the recent study, published in Psychological Science, adult participants were told short stories. That was followed by 10 minutes where some rested awake but undistracted, while others played a non-verbal spot-the-difference game. Those who had the wakeful rest remembered more of the story’s information a week later. Read the whole story: The Irish Times
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Language and Emotion – Insights from Psychological Science
We use language every day to express our emotions, but can this language actually affect what and how we feel? Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the ways in which the interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being. Putting Feelings into Words Can Help Us Cope with Scary Situations Katharina Kircanski and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles investigated whether verbalizing a current emotional experience, even when that experience is negative, might be an effective method for treating for people with spider phobias.
