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Singles Bar Science: Your Posse Makes You Better Looking
TIME: Say you just walked into a club on a Saturday night. Say you’re hoping you won’t leave alone. Odds are pretty good you’re not the only person there who’s thinking along those lines. That means you agonized at least a little before you left the house: What should you wear? How do you look? Do you do your hair this way (ugh, no) or that (ack, even worse)? Perhaps most important: do you fly solo or bring some chums? And if you do come with friends, who should they be? ... The answer, according to a new study just published in Psychological Science, is that whenever possible, bring your gang with you. Any one person seen in a group just seems better looking than when viewed alone.
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The Psychology of Online Comments
The New Yorker: Several weeks ago, on September 24th, Popular Science announced that it would banish comments from its Web site. The editors argued that Internet comments, particularly anonymous ones, undermine the integrity of science and lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse. “Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story,” wrote the online-content director Suzanne LaBarre, citing a recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as evidence. While it’s tempting to blame the Internet, incendiary rhetoric has long been a mainstay of public discourse.
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Happy People Steal More
Scientific American Mind: Who stole the office stapler? A study in April's Psychological Science argues it's more likely to have been your happiest colleague than your grumpiest. Observing that happier people are more mentally flexible, psychologists at Cornell University wondered whether they might be more morally flexible as well. To find out, the team showed 90 undergraduates either a cheerful video of a cartoon duck showering or a neutral screensaver. Read the whole story: Scientific American Mind
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Are You Okay? You Smell Like Cytokines.
The Huffington Post: Nurses and hospice workers say they can smell the final approach of death. Not with sudden death, but with the slow march toward the grave, the body's systems begin to shut down and metabolism changes, so that breath and skin and fluids give off a distinctive odor that signals the end is near. This is not surprising. In fact it's more perplexing that deadly diseases don't announce their presence earlier. From an evolutionary perspective, it would be more advantageous if we could all detect early warning signals, olfactory cues that the immune system is gearing up to ward off a new and threatening disease.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Stability of Intelligence From Age 11 to Age 90 Years: The Lothian Birth Cohort of 1921 Ian J. Deary, Alison Pattie, and John M. Starr How stable is intelligence over the lifespan? Participants completed the Moray House Test No. 12 (MHT) -- a paper-and-pencil test of general mental ability -- at ages 11 and 90. MHT scores at age 11 and at age 90 were significantly correlated. MHT performance at age 90 was also significantly correlated with performance on other commonly used assessments of cognitive functioning at age 90, indicating that intelligence has moderately high stability across the lifespan.
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A Friendly Face Might Mask Ill Intent
Oxytocin, sometimes called the “trust hormone” might actually inhibit our skill in detecting hidden intentions in others’ faces, a study suggests.
