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Willpower’s secret weapon? Sugar
The Globe and Mail: If you’ve adopted some challenging New Year’s resolutions, a spot of sugar may be just the thing to keep you on track. Yes, even you dieters. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister of Florida State University shared the unusual tip in his recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Willpower, it turns out, is a mental resource that becomes depleted through the day. In the case of dieting, a calorie-counter may find it easy to avoid fattening foods in the morning, but after a day of tough choices, it’s increasingly likely that she will break down and reach for forbidden foods by bedtime.
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Why Placebos Work Wonders
The Wall Street Journal: Say "placebo effect" and most people think of the boost they may get from a sugar pill simply because they believe it will work. But more and more research suggests there is more than a fleeting boost to be gained from placebos. A particular mind-set or belief about one's body or health may lead to improvements in disease symptoms as well as changes in appetite, brain chemicals and even vision, several recent studies have found, highlighting how fundamentally the mind and body are connected. It doesn't seem to matter whether people know they are getting a placebo and not a "real" treatment.
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Infants Possess Intermingled Senses
Scientific American: What if every visit to the museum was the equivalent of spending time at the philharmonic? For painter Wassily Kandinsky, that was the experience of painting: colors triggered sounds. Now a study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that we are all born synesthetes like Kandinsky, with senses so joined that stimulating one reliably stimulates another. The work, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, has become the first experimental confirmation of the infant-synesthesia hypothesis—which has existed, unproved, for almost 20 years. Read the full story: Scientific American
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How Kim Jong Un’s looks may help him rule
msnbc: Photographs show he has his grandfather’s double chin and dark eyebrows, and his haircut supposedly is a throwback to the older man’s style in the 1940s. Some reports speculate that Kim Jong Un has even undergone plastic surgery to make him look more like his popular grandfather, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, and less like his father, Kim Jong Il, who was not as well-liked.
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Why natural leaders are too self-obsessed to be good bosses
Daily Mail: Their swaggering arrogance and natural authority can make it seem like they were born to lead. But, though dominant individuals frequently make it to the top of the career ladder, their self-obsession often makes them the worst bosses, a study has shown. University of Amsterdam researchers divided 150 participants into groups of three. One in each was made leader and the other two were told they could advise, but that the leader would make the decision. The groups then had to choose the best candidate for a job. Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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Exercise Is Good for Your Waistline – But It’s a Writing Exercise
Is losing weight as simple as doing a 15-minute writing exercise? In a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, women who wrote about their most important values, like close relationships, music, or religion, lost more weight over the next few months than women who did not have that experience. “We have this need to feel self-integrity,” says Christine Logel of Renison University College at the University of Waterloo, who cowrote the new study with Geoffrey L. Cohen of Stanford University.
