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Hey, Impulse Spenders: Here’s a Solution to Your Bad Habit
TIME: A study recently published in Psychological Science shows that an attitude of gratitude tempers impulsive urges. In the study, participants had the option of receiving $54 now or $80 in a month. The researchers then induced moods of happiness, neutrality, or gratitude. Participants in the happy or neutral groups preferred the smaller sum immediately—the typical response in delayed gratification experiments. The surprise came from those who felt grateful. They preferred to wait for the larger sum, which is the smarter, if less immediately gratifying, option. Read the whole story: TIME
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What we really taste when we drink wine
The New Yorker: Two glasses sit side by side on the table, each filled midway up with red wine. On the bottom of each stem is a white piece of paper. One reads “Wine A”; the other, “Wine B.” I, along with approximately one hundred and thirty others, have a simple assignment: taste both wines and rate their tastes from one (worst) to ten (best), then write down which we think is more expensive. We aren’t allowed to comment out loud or talk with our neighbors. What—and how—will we choose? And will those rankings match the rankings and prices of the actual wines inside each glass? This live-action experiment was conducted in early June by the Columbia University neuroscientist Daniel Salzman.
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This Is Your Stressed-Out Brain On Scarcity
NPR: Being poor is stressful. That's no big surprise. In a poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 1 in 3 people making less than $20,000 a year said they'd experienced "a great deal of stress" in the previous month. And of those very stressed-out people, 70 percent said that money problems were to blame. ... Money seems to rule Boria's brain. Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir says that's normal for someone who's not making ends meet. Shafir studies the brain on scarcity. He told me that it doesn't matter what kind of scarcity you're dealing with. When humans don't have enough of something, that fact dominates our consciousness.
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Investigating the Siren Song of Mobile Devices in the Car
The vast majority of U.S. states ban motorists from texting while driving, and at least a dozen bar even voice conversations over a handheld device. Similar prohibitions are being enacted around the world. But so far they haven’t made a substantial dent in distracted driving. At any given moment during the day in the United States, approximately 660,000 drivers are using a handheld communications device instead of concentrating on the road, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So why do so many of us ignore the dangers of texting or chatting on the phone when we’re behind the wheel?
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Seeing the Glass as Half Full: Taking a New Look at Cognition and Aging
From a cognitive perspective, aging is typically associated with decline. As we age, it may get harder to remember names and dates, and it may take us longer to come up with the right answer to a question. But the news isn’t all bad when it comes to cognitive aging, according to a set of three articles in the July 2014 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science. Plumbing the depths of the available scientific literature, the authors of the three articles show how several factors -- including motivation and crystallized knowledge -- can play important roles in supporting and maintaining cognitive function in the decades past middle age.
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Practice May Not Be As Important As People Think
New York Magazine: Practice is a hot concept, especially in the age of high-stakes testing and Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell, you may recall, claimed in his 2008 book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of practice time (or therabouts) to achieve mastery of a skill. Since then, the claim has come in for a fair amount of debunking, and a new study in Psychological Science further complicates things. Practice, accordings to its findings, doesn't do a great job explaining why some people are better than others at a given skill.
