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Throwback Thursday: The Psychology Behind its Success
CNN: FORTUNE -- I archive dive almost every Thursday, searching for the perfect photograph: a shot from one of college's many Ugly Sweater parties; my best friend and I, 20 pounds lighter, grinning at prom; my sisters and I huddled together in 1996, our matching bowl cuts perfectly aligned. With a little help from the slight aging powers of the Valencia filter, my picture-perfect memories are posted to Instagram -- never without the beloved #tbt hashtag. I'm far from Instagram's only wistful user. To date, more than 228 million photos have been tagged with a "Throwback Thursday" hashtag -- either #tbt or #throwbackthursday -- indicating the use of a crowd-pleasing photo from days gone by.
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Apps Intended to Speed Up Reading Rate May Reduce Comprehension
The Washington Post: Readers of this space learned a few weeks ago about Spritz, an app that promises to dramatically increase your reading speed by converting text to a fast-moving sequence of individual words or phrases. Because the text is moving, your eyeballs don’t have to, so you get through words faster. Such speed-reading apps have been getting a lot of attention, but a newstudy published in the journal Psychological Science warns of a downside: You may read faster but learn less.
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Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)
The Atlantic: The idea of the emblem is obvious: This is an illustration of a trophy with an abstract soccer ball on top. The colors—green, yellow, and blue—mirror the host country's flag. Now consider this tweet from copywriter Holly Brockwell, which got 2,400 thousand retweets: "CANNOT UNSEE: the Brazil 2014 logo has been criticised for 'looking like a facepalm.'" ... I couldn't find anyone who studies the really specific cannot-unsee phenomenon that I'm talking about here. But Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino has been studying phenomena like this for decades. He sent me a famous image from the academic literature that gets at what's happening with the World Cup logo.
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How Your Hobbies Impact Your Work Performance
Inc. Magazine: Hopefully, you don’t need an extra reason to enjoy your hobbies, but if you happen to be one of the many professionals who are struggling to keep their constant busyness from encroaching on their favorite activities, a new study might give you a motivation boost to keep up with your pastime of choice. The research out of San Francisco State University looked at how creative activities like knitting, cooking, painting, photography, gardening or what-have-you affect work performance.
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Relationship Satisfaction Linked with Changing Use of Contraception
Women’s sexual satisfaction in long-term heterosexual relationships may be influenced by changes in hormonal contraceptive use, research from the University of Stirling shows. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, was carried out by researchers from the universities of Stirling, Glasgow, Newcastle, Northumbria and Charles University in Prague. The team looked at a sample of 365 couples, and investigated how satisfaction levels — in both sexual and non-sexual aspects of long-term relationships — were influenced by women’s current and historical use of hormonal contraception.
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You Are What You Eat
The Economist: Many psychological studies conducted over the past two decades suggest Westerners have a more individualistic, analytic and abstract mental life than do East Asians. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this. One, that modernisation promotes individualism, falls at the first hurdle: Japan, an ultra-modern country whose people have retained a collective outlook. A second, that a higher prevalence of infectious disease in a place makes contact with strangers more dangerous, and causes groups to turn inward, is hardly better. Europe has had its share of plagues; probably more that either Japan or Korea.
