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Flu psychology: Who risks what for whom?
My local pharmacy is offering flu shots. The sign grabbed my attention the other day, because it was a sweltering, muggy day, and it seemed way too early to think about winter flu bugs. But a little digging proved me wrong. The vaccine takes a couple weeks to click in, and seasonal flu bugs can arrive as early as October. So I did the arithmetic, and I’m lining up to get poked. I’ve gotten flu shots for years, though I’m not in any high-risk group. It just seems prudent to me. And the fact is, public health officials count on people who are at low or moderate risk to get inoculated anyway.
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How Urban Parks Enhance Your Brain
The Atlantic: A couple weeks ago the folks at Cracked told readers that "living in a city makes you dumber." There are a number of flaws here — beyond the obvious one of getting your science news from Cracked — but the research at the center of the claim has some relevance to cities worth considering nonetheless. What it tells us is not so much a story about the hazards of city living as it is about the benefits of city parks. The original study at issue here, which I'm familiar with from earlier work, was published back in 2008 in Psychological Science.
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L’ozio rende tristi (Idleness saddened)
La Stampa: Chissà cosa direbbe Bertrand Russell, l’autore della raccolta di saggi intitolata “Elogio dell’ozio” sapendo che chi si trastulla nel dolce far nulla in realtà è più triste di chi invece s’impegna in una qualche attività, anche semplice, o un hobby. C’è da dire che in verità Russell non proponeva di starsene in panciolle tutto il giorno, ma di impegnarsi in attività lavorative per 4 ore al giorno in modo da avere il tempo di pensare, socializzare eccetera – e questa potrebbe anche essere una meta a cui molti vorrebbero poter arrivare. Ma l’uomo moderno – a parte qualche eccezione – a stare fermo proprio non ci riesce.
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Wobbly Chairs May Affect Your Values
Scientific American: A wobbly chair is more than just annoying. Believe it or not, it can influence your values, or beliefs about others. Past studies have shown a link between physical objects and our emotions. Carry a cold drink at a party and you’re likely to consider other guests cold and offputting. Hold a warm drink, and you tend to perceive those same people as warm and welcoming. In a new study, subjects sat either on wobbly chairs or stable chairs. While seated, they were asked to gauge the stability of several celebrity relationships, for example, Jay-Z and Beyonce.
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Rising field of science boosts how we grasp thought
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Say you're getting ready to take the SAT. You spend hours brushing up on vocabulary; you do hundreds of practice problems; you learn tips on test-taking from a tutor. Those are good techniques, but you might consider adding a new trick: wearing a lab coat. People who wore white lab coats made half as many mistakes on attention-related tasks as those wearing their regular clothes, according to a study published this year by Hajo Adam, a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, along with colleague Adam Galinsky. It is unclear whether the effects wear off over time, or if knowing the trick removes its effectiveness.
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Talk Yourself Into Top Performance
Forbes: In the privacy of our minds, we all talk to ourselves — an inner monologue that might seem rather pointless. As one scientific paper on self-talk asks: “What can we tell ourselves that we don’t already know?” But as that study and others go on to show, the act of giving ourselves mental messages can help us learn and perform at our best. Researchers have identified the most effective forms of self-talk, collected here — so that the next time you talk to yourself, you know exactly what you should say. Self-talk isn’t just motivational messages like “You can do it!” or “Almost there,” although this internal cheering section can give us confidence.
