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Checking Off Symptoms Online Affects Our Perceptions of Risk
You’ve been feeling under the weather. You Google your symptoms. A half-hour later, you’re convinced it’s nothing serious—or afraid you have cancer. More than 60 percent of Americans get their health information online, and a
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Police officers at risk of memory loss after physical exertion
Metro News: Just 60 seconds of adrenaline-pumping activity can 'seriously damage' their recollection of the event, according to UK scientists. They say forgetfulness is often triggered by high-energy events like chasing a suspect. Lorraine Hope, from the University of Portsmouth, believes her findings, published in journal Psychological Science, flag up the potential problems with witness statements. She said: 'Police officers are often expected to remember in detail who said what and how many blows were received or given in the midst of physical struggle or shortly afterwards.
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Visual illusions may help boost sports performance
Yahoo! India: One of the ways in which a player might be able to improve his chances at making a free throw during a basketball tournament could be by tricking himself into thinking that the basket is bigger than it really is, a new study has suggested. Purdue University's psychological scientist Jessi Witt, who has played sports her whole life, started studying how perception relates to sports performance in graduate school. "You hear about athletes making these comments like, oh, I was playing so well, everything seemed like it was moving in slow motion," she said. Much of her research has examined this effect-how people who are doing well at a sport seem to see the world differently.
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The Bad Science Reporting Effect
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The press coverage of the so-called “QWERTY effect” in early March left me somewhat worried that it is so easy to publish bad science, but absolutely appalled at the state of science reporting. The alleged effect is that average scores on reported positivity or happiness associations are slightly higher for words having more letters from the right-hand side of the keyboard. By late on March 8, Mark Liberman at Language Log had re-examined the relevant statistics, noting that the effect is extremely weak. It could explain about a 10th of one percent of the variance in positive vs. negative affective judgments about words, if it existed.
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3 Parenting Dilemmas SOLVED
Men's Health: It’s no small feat beating TV and video games in the battle for your kids’ attention, but here’s one way to win: Just point your finger. In a new study, University of Virginia researchers found that if an adult gestured with their index finger, children were more likely to believe that person was more knowledgeable than an adult who used a palm-down grasping gesture. “Children interpret pointing as a marker people use when they are trying to share or teach something,” says study author Carolyn Palmquist, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Virginia. Of course, attention problems might only be the tip of your parenting iceberg, so here’s how to handle a few more daily dilemmas.
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Refining the Formula That Predicts Celebrity Marriages’ Doom
The New York Times: In 2006, Garth Sundem and I confronted one of the great unsolved mysteries in social science: Exactly how soon will a given celebrity marriage blow up? Drawing on Garth’s statistical expertise and my extensive survey of the literature in supermarket checkout lines, we published an equation in The New York Times predicting the probability that a celebrity marriage would endure. The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire).
