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Dress for Success: How Clothes Influence Our Performance
Scientific American: The old advice to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, may have roots in more than simply how others perceive you—many studies show that the clothes you wear can affect your mental and physical performance. Although such findings about so-called enclothed cognition are mostly from small studies in the laboratory that have not yet been replicated or investigated in the real world, a growing body of research suggests that there is something biological happening when we put on a snazzy outfit and feel like a new person. ... Trying too hard to look sharp can backfire.
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Protecting a Few Students from Negative Stereotypes Benefits Entire Classroom
Interventions targeted at individual students can improve the classroom environment and trigger a second wave of benefits for all classmates, new research shows. The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicate that sharing a classroom with greater numbers of students who participate in a brief intervention can boost all students’ grades over and above the initial benefits of the intervention. “Our results suggest that the whole effect of an intervention is more than the sum of its individual effects,” explains psychological scientist Joseph Powers of Stanford University, lead author on the study.
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Words are more precious than money for NSF
Science: House Republicans have backed off from a controversial attempt to set funding levels for specific disciplines within the National Science Foundation (NSF). They have also agreed to give NSF officials a freer hand in deciding whether a research proposal benefits society. The changes are contained in a budget agreement announced today that would give NSF a 1.6% increase, to $7.46 billion, in the 2016 fiscal year, which runs until 30 September. The added $119 million exceeds budget levels in separate bills that had stalled in the House and Senate. However, it falls well short of the 5.2% boost that President Barack Obama had requested in February for the agency. ...
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Stop Being So Self-Conscious
The Atlantic: Can psychological research change your life? Most of the time, no—findings by psychologists don’t usually bear on everyday concerns. My colleagues at Yale, for instance, study topics such as the neuroscience of memory, how babies reason about social groups, and decision-making in psychopaths. Such studies are intended to explore how the mind works, and while their findings might ultimately make the world a better place—at least this is what we say in our grant proposals—that’s not their immediate focus. ...
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Op-Ed Can 1 million women be wrong about happiness and health?
Los Angeles Times: Do happier people live longer? An article in the British medical journal Lancet made headlines this month claiming the answer to that question is no. The researchers based their conclusion on data from the Million Women Study in Britain, and it contradicts a large body of research, not to mention conventional wisdom. Because it was a large study, and the Lancet is a well-regarded publication, the message seemed definitive: Happiness doesn't matter for your health. ... But the Lancet study is far from definitive. Happiness does matter for your health. A lot. The data the researchers analyzed are indeed interesting and potentially valuable.
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How The Food Industry Helps Engineer Our Cravings
NPR: It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with food. But how much? And what role does the food industry as a whole play? As part of Here & Now's series this week on obesity,America on the Scale, host Jeremy Hobson spoke with investigative reporter Michael Moss of The New York Times. ... They would hire people like Howard Moskowitz, trained in high math at Queens College and experimental psychology at Harvard. Howard was one of the people responsible for some of the biggest icons in the grocery store. For example, he walked me through his recent creation of a new soda flavor for Dr. Pepper. ...
