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Powerful people think they’re taller than they are (we’re looking at you, Sarkozy)
Toronto Star: Women don’t need high heels to feel taller – all they need is a little bit of power. People overestimate their height when they are in more powerful positions, according to new research from Washington University and Cornell. “Although a great deal of research has shown that physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that the powerful may actually feel taller than they are,” Michelle Duguid and Jack Goncalo wrote in the study. Perhaps 5-foot-5 French President Nicholas Sarkozy, notorious for standing on boxes while being photographed, really feels like he’s 6-foot-1.
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Kids Want Fame More Than Anything
Huffington Post: "This is America, where everyone has the right to life, love and the pursuit of fame." -- Ryan Seacrest, American Idol, 2010 In the new millennium, people face messages highlighting the significance of fame everywhere they look. Not only in reality television shows such as "Keeping up with the Kardashians" and "American Idol", but also in popular fictional TV shows, even those targeted to children. After watching some of these shows with my then 9-year-old daughter, I grumbled about the drastic change in "values." Worried that I was becoming one of those predictable adults who lament that things were much better in the past, I decided to test my hypothesis.
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Study: Challenging seniors’ brains can also change their personality
CNN Health: We’ve all heard the adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks." But new research reveals that you CAN teach an older adult how to improve their brain skills, with the added effect of changing a personality trait, making them more open to new experiences. Using subjects from a study designed to improve brain skills of older people, the researchers hypothesized that improving cognitive skills might also increase participants openness - a personality trait that allows a person to be receptive to new experiences or being engaged by novel ideas such as an intellectual challenge.
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The Psychology of the Serenity Prayer
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” These are the first lines of what’s known as the Serenity Prayer, which is well known to many recovering alcoholics. It’s often recited in the rooms of AA as a reminder of the core principle of successful sobriety: Acceptance of the reality that for addicts, nothing but absolute, lifelong abstinence will lead to healthy and lasting recovery. As simple as that message is, it’s very difficult for many alcoholics to embrace, at least at first.
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To “Think Outside the Box”, Think Outside the Box
Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.
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Science’s “most beautiful theories”
Reuters: From Darwinian evolution to the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance, the favorite theories of the world's most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself. Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question. In previous years, they have included "how is the Internet changing the way you think?" and "what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?" This year, he posed the open-ended question "what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?" Read the full story: Reuters
