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Want to improve your memory? Oh, forget it
msnbc: The better you can forget, the better you’ll be able to remember, scientists now say. To remember facts that are important in your life today, you have to be able to let go of information that you no longer need, says Benjamin Storm, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “For example, if someone asks you who is the current Speaker of the House, you might remember Newt Gingrich or Nancy Pelosi,” explains Storm, co-author of a study on the subject published in Current Directions in Psychological Science. “That, of course, is incorrect.
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Men Are Funnier Than Women, But Not By Much, Study States
Huffington Post: Men are funnier than women, according to a study published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Skeptical? Keep reading, there's a catch. Researchers at the University of California San Diego released a study that suggests males are more likely to make people laugh, but only by a small margin of 0.11 points. The researchers wanted to explore if the "women aren't funny" gender stereotype stood up to a series of experiments. A group of 16 male and 16 female undergraduates were instructed to write humorous captions for 20 New Yorker comics. A group of 34 males and 47 females were brought in to rate how funny they found a caption.
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Can’t remember the names of Beckham’s children? Then lucky you for avoiding the acquisition of trivia
The Daily Telegraph: The capital of New Zealand, the date of the Battle of Waterloo, the boiling point of water, the six wives of Henry VIII, the longest river in Africa, the names of David Beckham’s children, the colours of the rainbow, the last three winners of The X Factor... we all have that sort of tat cluttering up our brains, but how much of it do we actually need? Shouldn’t we be making a determined effort to forget the lot? That’s the intriguing question raised by new research published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Undeserved Compliments May Harm Kids’ Self-Esteem
LiveScience: Giving yourself undeserved pats on the back may lead to psychological distress, a new study shows. The overly positive, yet distorted, view of one's achievements could keep someone from experiencing dejection, the researchers say. But the price may be more anxiety over whether others will find out. In addition, if a person thinks they are doing such a bang-up job, there's no room for improvement. Young-Hoon Kim of the University of Pennsylvania and Chi-Yue Chiu of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore conducted four studies that included 295 U.S. college undergraduates with an average age of 19 and 2,780 Hong Kong students from grades 7 to 12.
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Scientific Freedom, False Positives and the Fountain of Youth
The Huffington Post: "Chronological rejuvenation" is psychological jargon for the Fountain of Youth, that elusive tonic that, when we find it, will reverse the aging process. Though many of us would welcome such a discovery, most of us also know it's a fantasy, a scientific impossibility. So imagine my surprise when I came across this report on chronological rejuvenation while browsing in the highly regarded journal Psychological Science.
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Narcissists’ Overconfidence May Hide Low Self-Esteem
Live Science: Narcissists may seem to love themselves, but a new study finds that narcissistic self-aggrandizement may hide deep feelings of inferiority. According to the new research, people who are narcissistic are likely to tell psychologists that they feel good about themselves. But when the psychologists trick these narcissists into thinking they're hooked up to a working lie-detector test, the truth comes out and the narcissists admit to lower self-esteem. "This suggests that individuals with high levels of narcissism may be inflating their self-esteem," study researcher Erin Myers, a psychologist at Western Carolina University, told LiveScience.
