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Creepy People Leave You Cold
Scientific American: Jack Nicholson, playing the crazed caretaker in The Shining, makes me reach for a blanket. Now a study finds that people we find, well, creepy can actually make us feel colder. The research will be published in the journal Psychological Science. [N. Pontus Leander, Tanya L. Chartrand and John A. Bargh, "You Give Me the Chills: Embodied Reactions to Inappropriate Amounts of Behavioral Mimicry"] Researchers interviewed 40 college undergraduates. During each interaction, the experimenter was either chummy with the student or very stiff and professional. The investigator also alternated between mimicking students’ posture—a signal of rapport—and not doing anything at all.
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Interracial dating exposes divide between teens and parents
CNN: Luke, a white seventh grader, believes his parents would not be supportive if he dated an African-American girl. "Honestly I don't think my parents would be too happy because ... if you marry a black girl, you're connected to their family now," he said, adding, "and who knows what her family is really like?" Jimmy, a black seventh grader, recounted that after he had several white girlfriends, his parents seemed to interpret it as an affront to his own race.
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Mindfulness Meditation May Help Doctors Provide Better Care, Study Suggests
Huffington Post: Mindfulness meditation doesn't just lower stress and regulate our emotions -- it could also improve a doctor's ability to care for his or her patient, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center found that training doctors in mindfulness meditation helped them to listen better and not be as judgmental both at home and at work. The study will be published in the June issue of the journal Academic Medicine.
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On Pinterest, it’s share and share alike
Los Angeles Times: Americans spend upward of 30 hours a month staring at their computer screens, shopping and browsing and seeking. We relish the efficiency, the expanse of information, the anonymity and the freedom. But we are social creatures and as such, can't seem to stop gathering in various online communities to share music or photos of fabulous dinners or handbags. We come together when rumors circle over a Kim Kardashian-Kanye West courtship or the replacement for John Galliano is announced at Dior.
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For Better Decisions, Think in a Foreign Language
The Wall Street Journal: The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amon Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in part for identifying certain consistent deviations from rationality that seem to be endemic among human decision-makers. Susceptibility to “framing” is one such bias. Consider a situation in which a disease puts 600,000 people at risk, and it’s your job to choose the medicine to deploy. One option is presented his way: If you choose Medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved. If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that 600,000 people will be saved and a 66.6% chance that no one will be saved. That’s the “gain-frame” version of the question.
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Where the empty calories just keep on coming
The Washington Post: In a game obsessed with numbers — home runs, earned run averages, stolen bases, Derek Jeter hookups — it should come as little surprise, that, given half a chance, baseball fans can rattle off exactly how many hot dogs they’ve wolfed down during the course of a nine-inning game. Case in point: Before the first pitch at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore last week, Mark Mirchandani casually announced that he already had gobbled three Esskay dogs.
