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Anticipating baby name trends
Today's Parent: Everyone loves looking up baby name lists, right? Whether or not you are expecting, it's always fun to see what trends baby name experts are predicting for the coming year. But did you know that natural disasters and other cultural factors play a role in how we choose our child's name? According to Wharton marketing professors Jonah Berger and Eric Bradlow — from their upcoming article "From Karen to Katie: Using Baby Names to Understand Cultural Evolution" to be published in the Psychological Science journal — we are more inclined to choose a name that sounds similar to natural disasters than we may want to readily admit.
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The Moral Diet
The New York Times: In the 1970s, the gift shop at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was an informal affair. It was staffed by about 300 mostly elderly volunteers, and there were cash drawers instead of registers. The problem was that of the shop’s $400,000 in annual revenue, somebody was stealing $150,000. Dan Weiss, the gift shop manager at the time who is now the president of Lafayette College, investigated. He discovered that there wasn’t one big embezzler. Bunches of people were stealing. Dozens of elderly art lovers were each pilfering a little.
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Is the power of intuition overrated?
The Washington Post: Much has been written in the last 10 years about intuition, especially expert intuition. What’s so fascinating about intuition, of course, is the idea that one’s mind may work on a problem without one being aware of it. Keith Richards put it this way: Somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell’s going on. You might be getting shot at, and you’ll still be ‘Oh! That’s the bridge!’ And there’s nothing you can do; you don’t realize its happening. It’s totally subconscious, unconscious, or whatever. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink was largely devoted to this phenomenon.
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Social-Class Discrimination Contributes to Poorer Health
Discrimination felt by teenagers based on their social class background can contribute to physiological changes associated with poorer health, according to a new study published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Lead author Thomas Fuller-Rowell, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar, says that while the link between poverty and poor health has long been known, this is one of the first studies to consider the impact of class discrimination.
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Phew! The science of the close call
msnbc: With the school year winding down, students and teachers from coast-to-coast are letting out a huge sigh of relief. And whether you're feeling relief because you're retiring this June, found your misplaced cell phone, or got back a negative medical test result, the truth is scientists know surprisingly little about this common feeling. Recently two researchers studied this emotion to help paint a clearer picture of it. But what exactly is relief -- aside from that phew-inducing feeling as if a heavy weight has been lifted off your shoulders?
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We may be better at deciding than we think
The British Psychological Society: A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that people may be better at making decisions than they suspect. The study found individuals tend to be very good at judging how much time to spend making their mind up about certain choices. Andreas Jarvstad of Cardiff University noted previous findings have suggested while adults are usually competent at making smaller decisions, those that require a greater degree of analysis - such as making a big financial selection - pose more problems.
