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Still Puritan After All These Years
The New York Times: “I THINK I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores,” the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after visiting the United States in the 1830s. Was he right? Do present-day Americans still exhibit, in their attitudes and behavior, traces of those austere English Protestants who started arriving in the country in the early 17th century? It seems we do. Consider a series of experiments conducted by researchers led by the psychologist Eric Luis Uhlmann and published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
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Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don’t Realize It)
The Atlantic: The inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. has become an increasingly prevalent issue in recent years. One reason for this is that the visibility of this inequality has been increasing gradually for a long time--as society has become less segregated, people can now see more clearly how much other people make and consume. Owing to urban life and the media, our proximity to one another has decreased, making the disparity all too obvious. In addition to this general trend, the financial crisis, with all of its fall out, shined a spotlight on the salaries of bankers and financial workers relative to that of most Americans.
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Will the Real Independents Please Stand Up?
For die-hard Democrats and Republicans, the decision of who to vote for in November may be a no-brainer. In recent years, however, many voters have rejected such partisan identities, choosing to call themselves Independents. But new research suggests that Independents may not be as independent as they think. Psychological scientists Carlee Beth Hawkins and Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia decided to use a tool called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, to explore the unconscious biases that churn deep inside the Independent mind.
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Traits of the ‘Get It Done’ Personality: Laser Focus, Resilience, and True Grit
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Robert J. Sternberg has written 40 books and at least 1,400 articles and chapters over a career in which he has juggled jobs as professor, provost, and president of the American Psychological Association. As a psychologist who has studied the way people accomplish goals and stay motivated, he probably has a better insight than most other prolific scholars into what it takes to get things done when distractions tug and self-doubt creeps in. He's one of several experts The Chronicle asked for tips on the traits and habits of people who are particularly effective at accomplishing their goals in academe.
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To boost memory, shut your eyes and relax
Examiner: Forget brain-training exercises, 12-hour shifts and those long, uninterrupted, caffeine-fueled study binges. When you really need new information to sink in, you can’t skimp on taking breaks, new research suggests. That’s the message from a soon-to-be-published study by psychologists and neuroscientists at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, who asked a small group of normally aging elderly men and women to recall as many details as possible from two stories they were told. Following one of the stories (but not always the same one for all the participants), the men and women were instructed to relax, take a brief break and close their eyes for 10 minutes in a dark room.
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Anche il riposo è utile al cervello (Rest is also useful to the brain)
Corriere della Serra: Sempre di corsa, presi da mille impegni, senza mai un attimo per noi stessi. È la vita degli adulti ma anche, purtroppo, quella di tantissimi bambini sballottati fra scuola, corsi sportivi, lezioni di musica e via dicendo. Ma tutto questo può far male al cervello: lo segnalano alcuni psicologi californiani che, in un numero della rivista Perspectives on Psychological Science, tessono le lodi dei sogni a occhi aperti. Perché, dicono, in quei momenti il cervello non sta poltrendo, anzi: si sta esercitando nella dimenticata, ma utilissima, arte dell'introspezione.
