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A ’30 Rock’ Player Sells Himself to Science for ‘The Lutz Experiment’
The New York Times: To comedy fans, John Lutz is an unlikely cult figure — a performer at improv theaters and a former writer at “Saturday Night Live” who now plays an eponymous, endearingly silly sketch writer on “30 Rock.” “I don’t have any title over there, except for Lutz,” he said recently. “They gave me my own name.” To Jamil Zaki, an assistant professor in the psychology department of Stanford University, Mr. Lutz is something entirely different: “the perfect lab rat,” Dr. Zaki said. The men are now collaborators on a new book tentatively titled “The Lutz Experiment,” which was recently acquired by the Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster.
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Being selfish makes us happy – so long as we avoid the guilt
The Telegraph: Although we are taught the benefits of kindness and altruism, it seems we are happiest when simply told to pursue our own self-interest. Researchers found the key to contentment is feeling we have no choice but to be selfish. In contrast, the study, carried out by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, found that those who actively choose a selfish path usually have to battle with guilt. They speculated that because we're taught as children that 'sharing means caring', if we make a decision out of self-interest, we often feel bad for prioritising ourselves over others. But that frequently means we forego the things we know will make us happy.
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Does True Love Wait? Age of First Sexual Experience Predicts Romantic Outcomes in Adulthood
The timing of a person’s first experience with sexual intercourse predicts the quality and stability of their romantic relationships in young adulthood.
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Immune Response May Link Social Rejection to Later Health Outcomes
Data from healthy adolescents indicate that recent exposure to targeted rejection activates the molecular signaling pathways that regulate inflammation.
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Testing Can Help Students After All
The Wall Street Journal: In recent years, testing has gained new importance in public schools, much to the chagrin of its critics. But several recent scholarly articles bolster the case that testing can help students learn. Testing has long been known to facilitate later recall. But psychologist Shana K. Carpenter, in surveying the recent scholarly literature, found “robust benefits” from testing on students’ ability to apply their learning in different contexts, which is presumably the point of school.
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Preferences influence choices we make
Asian News International: We come to place more value on the options we chose and less value on the ones we rejected be it choosing between presidential candidates or household objects, researcher say. One way of explaining this effect is through the idea of cognitive dissonance. Making a selection between two options that we feel pretty much the same about creates a sense of dissonance. Re-evaluating the options after we've made our choice may be a way of resolving this dissonance. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in numerous studies, but the studies have only examined preference change shortly after participants make their decision.
