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People Mimic Each Other, But We Aren’t Chameleons
It’s easy to pick up on the movements that other people make—scratching your head, crossing your legs. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people only feel the urge to mimic each other when they have the same goal. It’s common for people to pick up on each other’s movements. “This is the notion that when you’re having a conversation with somebody and you don’t care where your hands are, and the other person scratches their head, you scratch your head,” says Sasha Ondobaka of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
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Searching for the real relationship between money and happiness
The Washington Post: Can money make you happy? An entire quantitative field of study, happiness economics, has grown up around that question. In reading the literature, I came to one inescapable conclusion: Happiness economics makes some academics happy because they can publish conflicting papers that help them earn tenure. Oh, and they’ve boiled down happiness to an equation: Wit = α + βxit + εit. But the real relationship between income and happiness is more nuanced, and measuring people’s true feelings is tricky. For example, when study subjects are asked how happy they think people at different income levels are likely to be, they generally underestimate the happiness of the poor.
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Impatient? It May Hurt Your Credit Score
Forbes: Your propensity to wait (or not) is also reflected in your credit score, according to a study from researchers at Columbia and Stanford published online in Psychological Science. Patient people tend to have higher credit scores than those who just can’t wait. Participants who were the most willing to wait for the bigger payout had FICO scores that were roughly 30 points higher than those who were least willing to delay, the study found. Those who were the least willing to delay fell below the subprime credit score cutoff of 620, below which people generally pay much higher borrowing costs on credit cards and other loans. Read the full story: Forbes
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No Limits to Computer Play, Says Psychologist Peter Gray
Wired: What haven’t computers and screens been blamed for? The debates over video game violence and the impact technology are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Since the advent of TV there have been hundreds of trials, research reports, and papers trying to provide a definitive answer to the question of the impact and value of screen-based activity on the lives of children. Surely the fact that the jury is still out and there is no certainty on either side of the debate tells us that this is all a bit more nuanced than we often hear from the commentators. Still, the discussions continue. Read the whole story: Wired
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Men And Women’s Differences Extend To Personality, Study Claims
The Huffington Post: Men and women are more alike than different -- that's been the consensus view for many years among the researchers who study personality differences between the sexes. But a new study claims this wisdom is wrong. By correcting for measurement errors, three researchers put forth a study that was published on Wednesday on the Public Library of Science website saying they've found that men and women feel and behave in markedly different ways. They're almost like "different species," Paul Irwing, one of the researchers, told The Huffington Post.
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UA study: Divorce can raise risk of early death
USA Today: Be careful. Your health could plummet as if you had taken up smoking, become overweight or started drinking excessively. A new review by the University of Arizona of more than 30 published studies found divorced adults have a significantly higher risk of early death compared with married adults. The risk of dying early was 23 percent greater among divorced adults than married couples tracked by researchers for an average of 11 years.
