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Facebook has a stronger draw than sex for some, study finds
The Toronto Star: Well, it may not have come to that (as of yet) but a new study suggests social media activity, such as checking tweets and email, trumps sex — as well as smoking and alcohol — in terms of sheer irresistibility. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, operating in Germany, used smartphone-based surveys to check the desires of 205 men and women, most of whom were college aged, ABC News reported. For one week the phones buzzed seven times daily alerting the students to take a survey on the type, strength and timing of their desires (for sex and/or using social media) and their ability to resist them.
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That Guy Won? Why We Knew It All Along
The New York Times: The economy, “super PAC” money, debate performances, the candidates’ personalities. Roll it all together, and it’s obvious who’s going to win. Or, uh, it will be. Amid the many uncertainties of next Tuesday’s presidential election lies one sure thing: Many people will feel in their gut that they knew the result all along. Not only felt it coming, but swear they predicted it beforehand — remember? — and probably more than once. These analysts won’t be hard to find. They will most likely include (in addition to news media pundits) neighbors, friends, co-workers and relatives, as well as the person whose reflection appears in the glare of the laptop screen.
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Nothing worse than office peppiness
Chicago Tribune: Every office has a person who has taken a few too many drags on the pep pipe. A manager or co-worker whose sunny disposition can cloud an otherwise delightfully pessimistic day. I'm talking about the patrons of positivity, the bright-siders, the people who see every glass as half full and every mistake as an "error-portunity." You don't have to be like me — a lifelong subscriber to American Cynics Illustrated — to find these folks grating or even to ask whether they are detrimental to the workplace. A recent note from a reader makes a good argument that they are. It described a boss who is an aphorism-spouting optimism addict.
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Parenting style may shape political views of offspring
Asian News International: A new study has linked parenting practices and temperament in childhood to later political ideology. Existing research suggests that individuals whose parents espoused authoritarian attitudes toward parenting (e.g., valuing obedience to authority) are more likely to endorse conservative values as adults. And theory from political psychology on motivated social cognition suggests that children who have fearful temperaments may be more likely to hold conservative ideologies as adults. Unfortunately, almost all of the existing research looking at these two factors suffers from significant methodological shortcomings.
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Social Rejection Could Affect Body’s Immune System, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post: We all know that rejection seriously hurts -- and now a new study shows how it could actually be bad for our health. Scientists from the University of British Columbia, Brandeis University and the University of California, Los Angeles have found that social stressors could affect our immune systems. "Targeted rejection is central to some of life's most distressing experiences -- things like getting broken up with, getting fired, and being excluded from your peer group at school," study researcher Michael Murphy said in a statement.
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This column will change your life: selfishness
The Guardian: It's a fairly well-established fact, in political psychology, that leftwingers report lower levels of happiness than rightwingers. (This fact, you may have noticed, is self-reinforcing: learning of it makes leftwingers even gloomier.) What's much less clear is why. Conservatives like to argue that it's because the things they value – traditional families, faith, free markets – make people happiest. Liberals prefer to think conservatives are blinkered, clinging to an ideology that lets them avoid confronting life's grim truths; it's even been proposed that conservatism might be a mental illness.
