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Streets with no game
Aeon: In 2007, the Whole Foods supermarket chain built one of their largest stores on New York City’s storied Lower East Side, occupying an entire block of East Houston Street from the Bowery to Chrystie Street. For the well-off, the abundant availability of high-quality organic foods was a welcome addition, but for the majority of locals, many of whom had roots going back generations to New York’s immigrant beginnings, the scale of the new store, selling wares that few of them could easily afford, was a symbolic affront to the traditions of this part of the city. ... Behavioural effects of city street design have been reported before.
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When Cops Choose Empathy
The New Yorker: About four years ago, in a city park in western Washington State, Joe Winters encountered a woman in the throes of a psychotic episode. As he sat down next to her, she told him that she had purchased the bench that they now shared and that it was her home. “I didn’t buy the hallucinations, but I tried to validate the feelings underneath them,” Winters told me. His strategy resembled Rogerian psychotherapy—unconditionally accepting a patient’s experience, even when it is untethered from reality. But Winters is not a roving psychologist; he is a deputy in the King County Sheriff’s Office.
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Researchers have discovered a surprisingly simple way to get kids to eat more veggies
The Washington Post: It seems like an age-old problem — kids not eating their vegetables — and it is. Little ones, more interested in macaroni and cheese than sautéed spinach, are still leaving the latter largely untouched. The proof is both anecdotal — what parent hasn't tussled with this? — and borne out in data. Nine out of 10 children, after all, still don't eat enough vegetables, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ... Researchers at Texas A&M University, looking for patterns in food consumption among elementary school children, found an interesting quirk about when and why kids choose to eat their vegetables.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Iconic Gestures Facilitate Discourse Comprehension in Individuals With Superior Immediate Memory for Body Configurations Ying Choon Wu and Seana Coulson Iconic gestures are those that depict an aspect of the object or action to which they are referring. The researchers hypothesized that sensitivity to the meaning of these types of gestures is linked to differences in kinesthetic working memory (KWM). The researchers assessed participants' KWM span and had them watch short video clips in which a person's gestures were congruent or incongruent with the accompanying audio track.
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Think Remembering Is Always Best? Forget About It!
NPR: I forgot to schedule a haircut last week. I regularly forget my usernames and passwords. I've forgotten anniversaries, birthdays and promises. If these confessions sound familiar, it's because we forget all the time. And when wenotice we've forgotten, it usually means the thing we forgot was important. Forgetting in these cases is a failing and we naturally wish our memories were more complete. It's no wonder, then, that forgetting has a bad rap. But we also constantly forget in ways we don't notice — and a lot of this forgetting isn't bad. In fact, it could be crucial to making our memories work as well as they do. That's right: Forgetting can be a good thing.
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Economic Growth Can’t Buy Happiness
New psychological findings show why a country’s economic growth doesn’t always translate into greater happiness for its citizens.
