-
Be It Resolved
The New York Times: IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions: 1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution. 2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer. 3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.
-
Keeping a diary can help you to lose weight
AOL UK: If losing weight is one of your New Year's resolutions, it might be a good idea to start keeping a diary. New research, published in Psychological Science, showed that women who write about what they think and feel are more likely to lose weight than those who don't. Researchers at Canada's University of Waterloo studied 45 overweight female undergraduates. Half of the group were asked to write down their thoughts on their most important value and the other half were asked to write about a less important issue. Those who had written about an important value lost an average of 3.14lb, while the other group gained an average of 2.76lb. Read the full story: AOL UK
-
Meta-Analysis Helps Psychologists Build Knowledge
When scientists want to know the answer to a question that’s been studied a great deal, they conduct something called a meta-analysis, pooling data from multiple studies to arrive at one combined answer. Some people think this creates a chilling effect, shutting off further inquiry. But the authors of a new paper published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, write that meta-analysis actually helps scientific fields develop. There are many meta-analyses in psychology and medicine, areas where studies find often conflicting results.
-
Buff Your Brain
The Daily Beast: Brain training to sharpen memory. Aerobic exercise to preserve gray matter. Meditation to hone connections between reason and emotion. It all sounds great, but there’s something that has long bothered us about the growing number of studies pinpointing ways to buff your brain: they don’t go far enough. Sure, exercises to improve memory are better for your brain than, say, watching reality TV, but the most you’re going to gain is more reliable access to knowledge already scattered around your cerebral cortex.
-
The Perils of ‘Bite-Sized Science’
The Wall Street Journal: When I wrote, not long ago, about recent debates over possible flaws in the statistical methods used by academic psychologists* — or sloppy application of sound methods — I quoted one young researcher who said that short, punchy academic articles were more likely to be flawed than longer, more-comprehensive articles. That’s because the longer articles poke and prod findings from different angles, in perhaps a half-dozen different experiments (rather than two or three). This leads to less-readable work, frankly, and work that’s harder to boil down into a quick news item.
-
The Language of Lies
The Huffington Post: It turns out to be difficult to tell when other people are lying. There are lots of cues that we believe will tip us off to whether someone is telling the truth. We expect people telling the truth to be more confident, to look us in the eye when they talk, and to speak more fluently. But, these cues aren't really reliable indicators of truth telling. Someone might be uncomfortable talking about a topic and look away from you, yet still be telling you the absolute truth. A nice set of studies by Tom Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Medvec in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998 made this point.
