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Do You Feel Lucky?
The Wall Street Journal: Joe DeVito, a real-estate broker in Brooklyn, N.Y., has 18 active listings in ZIP Code 11219. Half of them have an eight in the asking price. Only one has a four. "They are priced for the luck and sold for the luck," Mr. DeVito says of homes in the Sunset Park neighborhood, where many of the residents are Asian. In Chinese culture, eight is considered to be a lucky number while four is believed to bring bad luck. Just like the lottery, real estate can be a numbers game in which superstition plays a role.
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How Communities Shape Our Morals
Scientific American Mind: In last month's column I recounted how my replication of Stanley Milgram's shock experiments revealed that although most people can be inveigled to obey authorities if they are asked to hurt others, they do so reluctantly and with much moral conflict. Milgram's explanation was an “agentic state,” or “the condition a person is in when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person's wishes.” As agents in an experiment, subjects shift from being moral agents in society to obedient agents in a hierarchy.
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Should you friend your boss on Facebook?
The Washington Post: In a sign of our changing times, a forthcoming white paper out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school bears the title, “OMG My Boss Just Friended Me.” The study will add to the small but growing body of academic research into how online relationships between colleagues inform, and are informed by, face-to-face interactions at the office. Eager to hear the results before they are officially published, I asked professor Nancy Rothbard, who worked on the study with researchers Justin Berg and Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, the obvious question: So? Should you and your boss be friends on Facebook? Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Experts say psychological effects of Sandy likely to grow
Chicago Tribune: The devastating winds and catastrophic flooding of Superstorm Sandy may have subsided, but psychological distress from the disaster and its patchy recovery is likely to be growing, trauma experts say. Those most vulnerable to long-term emotional fallout from the storm are people who lost loved ones or whose homes were destroyed. But the disruption to normal life could well affect millions of others, experts say. From New York City to commuter towns to Atlantic Ocean seaside resorts, daily routines have been turned upside down by power outages, fuel shortages, blocked roads, closed schools and canceled trains and buses. Read the whole story: Chicago Tribune
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Humans can smell fear, and it’s contagious
CBS: Humans can smell fear and disgust, and the emotions are contagious, according to a new study. The findings, published Nov. 5 in the journal Psychological Science, suggest that humans communicate via smell just like other animals. "These findings are contrary to the commonly accepted assumption that human communication runs exclusively via language or visual channels," write Gun Semin and colleagues from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Most animals communicate using smell, but because humans lack the same odor-sensing organs, scientists thought we had long ago lost our ability to smell fear or other emotions.
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“It was a dark and stormy divorce . . .”
About 2 million men and women go through marital separation every year, and many of those separations end in divorce. These stressful and painful events are known to cause all sorts of problems later on, including serious depression and deteriorating health. Despite this, very little is known about what really works to promote healing after a difficult breakup. One promising intervention is what’s known as “expressive writing,” which involves disclosing one’s deepest thoughts and feelings through daily writing exercises.
