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Do beautiful women have more socially desirable personalities?
NY Daily News: Beautiful women are often thought to be more social, successful, and well-adjusted than their less attractive counterparts. But a new study announced Monday finds that attractive women are more likely to have some not-so-pretty values, such as favoring social conformity and self-promotion over tolerance. Researchers from the Open University of Israel and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem investigated 118 university students averaging around 29-years-old. Subjects then completed surveys about their values and were videotaped walking around a room, reading a weather forecast, and then leaving the room.
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Study Looks at Bias in Celebration Penalty Calls
The New York Times: A Kansas City Chiefs cornerback returns an interception 58 yards for a touchdown, then flexes his biceps in the end zone with one foot resting on the ball. A Seattle wide receiver makes a throat-slashing gesture after catching a 52-yard pass for a score. A running back for Green Bay lies on his back in the end zone and waves his legs and arms to mime a snow angel after an 80-yard scoring catch. After an 18-yard touchdown catch on Jan. 1, a Buffalo receiver exposes an undershirt that has “Happy New Year” written on it. Each of these touchdown celebrations last season resulted in a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.
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New Research on Memory From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on memory published in the November 2012 issue of Psychological Science. Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Predicts Failure to Recall Negative Autobiographical Memories Benjamin C. Storm and Tara A. Jobe Failure to retrieve memories may not always be a bad thing - we might, for example, prefer to forget about certain instances of heartbreak or failure in favor of some of the more positive events from our lives. In this study, Storm and Jobe asked participants to perform a memory task meant to assess retrieval-induced forgetting - when remembering one piece of information leads to forgetting other information.
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Psychologists do some soul-searching
Nature News Blog: Psychologists are going through a period of intense self-reflection regarding the reliability of research in their field, fuelled by recently uncovered cases of fraud, failed attempts to replicate classic results, and calls from prominent psychologists to replicate key results in disputed fields. The latest volley in this debate is a special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, consisting of 18 papers that outline the scope of the so-called “replicability crisis”, and potential ways of fixing it.
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Need a Self-Control Boost? Gargle with Sugar Water!
Forbes: If you’re struggling to keep your self-control on track, keep a bottle of lemonade made with real sugar handy. You won’t have to drink it, just swish and gargle when you’re feeling like giving up. That’s the finding of new research published in the journal Psychological Science. Researchers from the University of Georgia recruited 51 students who performed two tasks to test self-control. The first task, which previous research has shown to deplete self-control, was tediously crossing out all the Es on a page from a statistics book.
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Hurricanes and Hot Baby Names
The New York Times: In this year’s first-grade classes, teachers might notice an unusual number of Kimberlys, Karens and Kevins. This follows an earlier bump for Alexes and Amandas, and other names that start with A. Why? One factor might be...the weather. As part of our research on trends and how ideas catch on, my colleagues and I analyzed more than 125 years of data on the popularity of baby names. Many, many Jessicas, Jacobs, Rivers and even Maxxes. We found that names that begin with K increased 9 percent after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And names that start with A were 7 percent more common after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. It wasn’t that people named their babies after the storms.
