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Diet Of Defeat: Why Football Fans Mourn With High-Fat Food
NPR: Backing a losing NFL team isn't just bad for your pride. It's bad for your waistline. A study that links sports outcomes with the eating behavior of fans finds that backers of NFL teams eat more food and fattier food the day after a loss. Backers of winning teams, by contrast, eat lighter food, and in moderation. After a defeat, the researchers found that saturated fat consumption went up by 16 percent, while after a victory it decreased by 9 percent. "After a victory, people eat better," says Pierre Chandon, a professor of marketing at the business school INSEAD in France. "After a defeat, people eat a lot worse." ...
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Your Choice of Friends Can Help You Improve Your Focus
Having trouble disciplining yourself to hit the gym rather than joining colleagues for happy hour? Unable to stop chatting with your friend in the next cubicle even though a deadline is looming? Many of us struggle to resist temptations—even fighting to keep from checking Facebook when we’re trying to finish a report to the boss. The remedy may be developing close working relationships with people who exhibit a high degree of self-discipline, according to a recent study.
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Psst. I hear that gossip is not all bad.
When I was growing up, there was a woman in the neighborhood known as The Mayor. She was not a mayor in any official sense, and in fact held no political office. She was a busybody and a gossip, and she made it her mission to spread the word on other neighbors’ lives—who got a DUI last night, whose teenage daughter was pregnant, who got fired at the factory and whose car dealership was struggling. Her specialty was scandal mongering, but truth be told, she usually had her facts right. Gossips have a reputation for being trivial and petty and often meanspirited. But is it possible that such babbling serves some valuable social purpose?
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The Family That Fights Together
The Wall Street Journal: It is a quandary every couple with children eventually faces: Should we fight in front of the kids? The answer is complicated. Child psychologists who study the issue tend to say yes—if parents can manage to argue in a healthy way. That means disagreeing respectfully and avoiding name-calling, insults, dredging up past infractions or storming off in anger, for starters. ... Even infants can be affected by angry disagreements—even when they're asleep.
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Losing Is the New Winning
The Atlantic: Now is the time for all good men to fail. Good women, too. Fail early and often, and don’t be shy about admitting it. Failing isn’t shameful; it’s not even failure. Such is the message of a growing body of self-help and leadership literature. “Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?” asks the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, in which she argues that a willingness to court failure can be a precursor to growth. Dweck holds, persuasively, that successful people are not the ones who cultivate a veneer of perfection, but rather those who understand that failing is part of getting smarter and better.
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How Being Poor Makes You Poor
Pacific Standard: Why are the rich rich and the poor poor? It’s a question that gets asked a lot, and a question we should continue asking. Do the wealthy simply work harder and for longer hours? Are they more willing to take risks and make sacrifices, while the destitute tend to sleep in past 10:00 a.m. and splurge all their cash on Cool Ranch Doritos Tacos from Taco Bell? Or is it more circumstantial—meaning, are the haves forged in homes where education is valued and opportunity abundant, while the have nots come from generation after generation of just scraping by? According to the BBC, income inequality in the U.S.
