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When Fatigue Boosts Creativity
The Atlantic: Most people know, instinctively, whether they are morning people or evening people. Some are hit with a wave of dread whenever they hear a stranger’s iPhone clanging out the same ringtone as their morning alarm. Others can be found yawning into their second beer at 10 p.m. on a Friday. (For those who aren’t sure, countless online questionnaires can tell you whether you should be catching the worm or not.) Our chronotypes are largely a function of when our bodies start and stop producing melatonin, the sleepiness hormone. Elementary and middle schoolers tend to be early risers, but productivity begins to shift to later in the day as people enter their teens and early 20s.
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The Toll of a Solitary Life
The New York Times: Do you like being alone? New research from Brigham Young University shows just how bad loneliness and social isolation, even for people who prefer their own company, can be for health. The researchers analyzed data collected from 70 studies and more than 3.4 million people from 1980 to 2014. The studies, which followed people for about seven years on average, showed that people who were socially isolated, lonely or living alone had about a 30 percent higher chance of dying during a given study period than those who had regular social contact.
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From Sadness to Anxiety: The Emotional Legacy of Sandy Hook
Pacific Standard: The truism—apparently first uttered by Steve Allen, the original host of the Tonight Show—is that tragedy plus time equals comedy. But a newly published study that looked at responses to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre suggests a different equation: Tragedy plus time equals anxiety. Analyzing a large dataset of Twitter messages, a Columbia University research team led by psychologists Bruce Doré and Kevin Ochsner found a decrease in sadness-related words the further removed commenters were from the horrible incident, in terms of either time or distance.
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Gender equality in science: a better future for everyone
The Guardian: The scarcity of women in the ranks of working scientists has been in the news for a discouragingly long time. But research studies designed to explain the reasons for this gender disparity are filled contradictions, mainly because they were conducted at different times and on different science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Last year the Association for Psychological Research published a monograph about women in STEM fields in their journal, Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
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Psychopath. Successful psychopath.
Forest “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas was a real-life swashbuckler, charismatic and daring. The World War II British spy, known as the “White Rabbit” to the Nazis, employed an array of disguises and fake documents to elude the enemy in Vichy France, once pretending to be a corpse while traveling in a coffin. He withstood severe torture by the Gestapo, leapt from a moving train, and strangled a prison guard with his bare hands. He was also known as a seducer of beautiful women. Most people have never heard of Yeo-Thomas, though most are familiar with his fictional incarnation. He was the inspiration for novelist Ian Fleming’s flamboyant hero Bond. James Bond.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Illusory Feature Slowing: Evidence for Perceptual Models of Global Facial Change Richard Cook, Clarisse Aichelburg, and Alan Johnston Much of the research examining face perception has studied static faces; there is less research examining how we process faces in motion. Participants viewed two faces: a standard face that was presented in an upright or an inverted position and a comparison face that was always presented upright. The eyes and the mouth of the standard face opened and closed, while only the eyes on the comparison face moved.
