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Watching TV can Boost Your Mental Health During Lockdown, Study Says
... So how can TV support our wellbeing? We know that art can stir intense emotions. More often than not, we are drawn to musicals, podcasts, TV programmes, films and other artistic productions because we want to experience strong emotions. According to research by Martin Seligman, a leading positive psychology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, experiencing positive emotions is one of the building blocks of our wellbeing. It would therefore make sense for us to watch more feelgood shows on TV to increase positive emotions.
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UCLA Study: Babies in Bilingual Households Respond Better to ‘Baby Talk’
Babies will pay more attention to baby talk than regular speech, regardless of which languages they're used to hearing, according to a study released today by UCLA's Language Acquisition Lab and 16 other labs around the globe. The study found that babies who were exposed to two languages had a greater interest in infant-directed speech -- that is, an adult speaking baby talk -- than adult-directed speech. Research has already shown that monolingual babies prefer baby talk. Some parents worry that teaching two languages could mean an infant won't learn to speak on time, but the new study shows bilingual babies are developmentally right on track.
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How the Pandemic May be Affecting Your Ability to Make Simple Decisions
... What researchers can say about our decision making process with some degree of certainty is that it can be negatively impacted by stress, especially when sustained over prolonged periods. “Stress decreases our working memory capacity, so we have fewer cognitive resources to wrap our heads around all the different options, even for things that are relatively inconsequential,” explains Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, and regular Fast Company contributor.
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Expert Advice On Love, Dating, And Pandemic Relationships
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: As far as Dr. Richard Slatcher's work goes, there are two types of people in the world. RICHARD SLATCHER: We really find that there are two groups - relationship haves and have-nots. And that's really delineated by how their relationships were doing going into the pandemic. CORNISH: Slatcher teaches in the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia. For about a year, he's been running a research project with collaborators around the world called Love In The Time Of COVID. He's found that people who started the pandemic with a romantic partner are probably headed in the same direction they were a year ago.
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Taylor Swift Is Singing Us Back to Nature
... A 2017 scientific paper published by the Association for Psychological Science reported that nature-themed words were losing ground in our pop culture. Researchers surveyed song lyrics, books and movie scripts and found that words associated with nature have declined steadily since 1950. During that time, the loss of nature words was most pronounced in songs. The scientists scanned the lyrics of 6,000 songs and found that the frequency of nature-themed words had declined by 63 percent. The researchers posit that as we lose our daily connection to nature, we think and write about it less often.
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This Book Is Not About Baseball. But Baseball Teams Swear by It.
... Baseball is littered with examples of varying body types — Astros second baseman Jose Altuve, who is 5-foot-6, and Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge, who is 6-7, finished 1-2 in the 2017 American League Most Valuable Player Award voting — but cognitive bias can cloud judgment, too. In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.
