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Winnie-the-Pooh and the Pervasiveness of Egocentric Bias: Why We Are All THAT Sort of Bear
Scientific American: This past week, Winnie-the-Pooh just wouldn’t let me go. Please write about me, he kept whining. And when I told him I’d already written about him last week, he just looked confused. So what? Write about me again. He insisted that one time was not nearly enough, that he had far, far more to share with the world—and that, after all, the world would be quite happy to hear far, far more about him. And why is that, I wondered? Here, Christopher Robin stepped in, right out of the first chapter of Winnie the Pooh. “Because he’s that sort of Bear.” Indeed. Solid logic if ever there was.
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Män inte så heta som de tror
TV4 Sverige: Vill hon... eller vill hon inte? Antagligen inte. Män överskattar nämligen sin sexuella attraktionskraft, medan kvinnor underskattar den. Men även om många män är ute på tunn is, är strategin inte så dum som den verkar. I det komplicerade samspel som ständigt förekommer oss människor emellan tillhör sexuella signaler bland de svåraste att tyda. För att ta reda på mer lät forskare vid University of Texas at Austin i USA 200 manliga och kvinnliga studenter genomgå en sorts speed-dejting. Därefter fick de uppskatta hur gärna de kunde tänka sig att ha en kortare sexuell relation med respektive partner samt deras egen sexuella attraktionskraft. Read the whole story: TV4 Sverige
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Is ‘twin communication’ a real thing?
msnbc: When twins Danielle and Nicole Fisher gave birth to baby boys within minutes of one another, people wondered whether it was the result of some sort of special twin telepathy. After all, what are the chances that two young women would get pregnant within weeks of one another and then deliver 13 minutes apart? The duo insists they didn’t consciously plan to get pregnant together. Twenty-three year old Nicole Fisher put it down to the “twin thing.” “It just has something to do with that twin communication,” she told her hometown New Jersey newspaper, The Courier-Post. But twin experts aren’t ready to explain this away with ESP.
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Pregnancy May Change Mom’s Brain For Good
LiveScience: Time in the womb is obviously important for the development of the fetal brain. But pregnancy is also a time for changes in Mom's brain — changes that may prepare women to become better mothers. These changes still are little-understood, concludes a review published in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Pregnant women often complain about "pregnancy brain" or "mommy brain," a memory fog that seems to produce lost car keys and misplaced cell phones. One 2010 study suggested that high levels of sex hormones could be to blame for the frustrating lapses in concentration.
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If a child or adult plays videogames, how does that affect IQ?
The Wall Street Journal: Recent studies linking increases in adults' cognitive performance to playing action videogames have sparked a lot of interest. People who are trained to play fast-paced, unpredictable games tend to score higher in the lab on tests of such skills as spotting a fast-moving target, tracking multiple objects and grasping visual information quickly, according to a research review published in 2008 in Psychology and Aging.
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The perils of ‘bite-size’ science
Short, fast, and frequent: Those 21st-century demands on publication have radically changed the news, politics, and culture—for the better or worse, many say. Now an article in January’s Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, aims a critique at a similar trend in psychological research. The authors, psychologists Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, call it “bite-size science”—papers based on one or a few studies and small samples. “We’re not against concision,” says Bertamini. “But there are real risks in this trend toward shorter papers.
