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Identification de suspects : comment améliorer l’efficacité de la traditionnelle line-up?
Express: Avec l’avènement des tests ADN, on s’est rendu compte que les séances d’identification de suspects potentiels de délit par des témoins d’une scène de délit aboutissaient fréquemment à des mises en accusation de personnes innocentes. Les témoins se sentent en effet obligés de désigner quelqu’un, lors des "line-up" (lorsque une dizaine de suspects leur sont présentés en ligne pour être reconnus), même lorsqu’ils ne sont pas tout à fait sûrs. Read the whole story: Express
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13 Fool-Proof Ways to Get Happier
Yahoo Finance: The pursuit of happiness may feel futile at times, especially as we've watched our 401(k)s and house values tank. How can we truly feel happy when life gets tough? U.S. News posed this question to leading happiness researchers to find out what strategies we can employ to stay upbeat. While it's true that some lucky folks are born with sunny dispositions, others, according to a growing body of research, can learn to be happy. How?
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Food on the brain: Study finds that hungry people see food-related words more clearly
The Daily Mail: Dieticians often warn of the dangers of over-indulging on calorific snacks and buying too much if we risk going food shopping while hungry. And it appears they may have a valid point after new research has discovered that how hungry we are directly effects how we view everyday situations. The study, published in Psychological Science, found that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people who’ve just eaten. Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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Virtuous Behaviors Sanction Later Sins
Scientific American: Anyone who has ever devoured a triple-chocolate brownie after an intense workout knows how tempting it can be to indulge after behaving virtuously. A new study suggests, however, that we often apply this thought process to inappropriate scenarios, giving ourselves license to act in unhealthy or antisocial ways. Researchers in Taiwan gave a sugar pill to 74 smokers, misleading half of them to think it was a vitamin C supplement. All the participants then took an unrelated survey and were told they could smoke if they desired. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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In Recognizing Faces, the Whole is Not Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
How do we recognize a face? To date, most research has answered “holistically”: We look at all the features—eyes, nose, mouth—simultaneously and, perceiving the relationships among them, gain an advantage over taking in each feature individually. Now a new study overturns this theory. The researchers—Jason M. Gold and Patrick J. Mundy of the Indiana University and Bosco S. Tjan of the University of Southern California—found that people’s performance in recognizing a whole face is no better than their performance with each individual feature shown alone. “Surprisingly, the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts,” says Gold.
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Want to Limit Aggression? Practice Self-Control!
Feeling angry and annoyed with others is a daily part of life, but most people don’t act on these impulses. What keeps us from punching line-cutters or murdering conniving co-workers? Self-control. A new review article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines the psychological research and finds that it’s possible to deplete self-control—or to strengthen it by practice. Criminologists and sociologists have long believed that people commit violent crimes when an opportunity arises and they’re low on self-control. “It’s an impulsive kind of thing,” says Thomas F.
