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Rediscovering Our Mundane Moments Brings Us Unexpected Pleasure
We like to document the exciting and momentous occasions in our lives, but new research suggests there is value in capturing our more mundane, everyday experiences, which can bring us unexpected joy in the future. “We generally do not think about today’s ordinary moments as experiences that are worthy of being rediscovered in the future. However, our studies show that we are often wrong: What is ordinary now actually becomes more extraordinary in the future — and more extraordinary than we might expect,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Ting Zhang of Harvard Business School.
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‘Drawings may indicate later intelligence,’ according to new study
The Washington Post: Don’t throw away your kid’s stick figure drawings just yet. Researchers found a “moderate correlation” between drawing and intelligence, a link that “seemed to be influenced by genes,” according to a study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. The test centered on identical and nonidentical twins, with 15,504 children participating. Each child was asked to draw a picture of a child and then given verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests. The children were first tested when they were 4 years old, and again 10 years later at age 14.
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Emergency Plane Landing Yields PTSD Clues
LiveScience: Interviews with the survivors of a 2001 emergency plane landing are helping researchers understand how certain memories may increase the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new study finds. The study's lead researcher has firsthand knowledge of the calamity. Margaret McKinnon, an associate professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, was on her honeymoon when Air Transat Flight 236, en route from Toronto to Lisbon, Portugal, ran out of fuel over the Atlantic. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Tooth Fairy feels the pinch after overspending
USA Today: The Tooth Fairy is holding her purse strings a bit tighter. She left 8% less this year - or an average of $3.40 for every lost tooth she finds under a pillow - down from $3.70 in 2013, according to a survey from Visa out Thursday. Still, she's leaving more than she did in 2012 before tooth inflation rose 23% from 2012 to 2013. "She's had her wings clipped a little bit," says Jason Alderman, Visa's vice president of global financial education. "Even though it is down, this is the first real decline we've seen even during the recession because Tooth Fairy inflation has far exceeded the rate of traditional inflation." ...
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Is Racism Just a Form of Stupidity?
The Huffington Post: I think that a lot of us are shying away from an obvious truth: that the kind of blatant racial prejudice we are witnessing in Ferguson, Missouri, has everything to do with stupidity. I'm talking about low intelligence, lack of mental ability, cognitive rigidity. Racists may be a lot of other things -- hateful, insecure -- but let's not sugar-coat what most fair-minded thinkers believe in their hearts: A person of intelligence cannot embrace such authoritarian and racist views. Intelligence is a scientific concept, something scientists can measure, and have for a long time.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Practice Does Not Make Perfect: No Causal Effect of Music Practice on Music Ability Miriam A. Mosing, Guy Madison, Nancy L. Pedersen, Ralf Kuja-Halkola, and Fredrik Ullén How essential is practice to achieving an expert level of performance? To answer this question, the authors asked monozygotic and dizygotic twins who play an instrument or sing how often they had practiced during four different age intervals (0-5 years, 6-11 years, 12-17 years, and 18 years till the time of measurement). The twins' music ability was assessed using a test of pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination.
