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Estimates in the Balance
The Wall Street Journal: Body posture can influence how we estimate such things as age and size, a study shows. Thirty-three undergraduates stood on a Wii Balance Board, a videogame-system accessory. Researchers surreptitiously manipulated the subjects' stances, slightly tilting them, though an onscreen measure misled the students into thinking they were evenly balanced. In each stance, students answered 13 questions, including the height of the Eiffel Tower, the size of the Netherlands and the life expectancy of a parrot. On average, participants gave smaller estimates when they leaned left than when they stood straight or leaned right—stances producing virtually identical results.
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Are Americans crazy for treating our pets like kids?
USA Today: The shopping frenzy has begun. Sweaters, toys and cushy new beds. All for "other" family members. The pets. The season of giving inevitably prompts pet lovers (53% of dog owners and 38% of cat owners) to gift their animals, often lavishly, says a survey by the American Pet Products Association. It also prompts the question: Is there something, well, weird about that? According to a Kelton Research survey commissioned by Milo's Kitchen pet treats: •81% regard their pets as full members of the family. •58% call themselves their pets' "mommy" or "daddy." •77% buy pets birthday gifts. •More than half say they talk about pets more than politics or sex. Read the full story: USA Today
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Nietzsche was right: adversity makes you stronger
The Telegraph: US psychologists found that while traumatic experiences such as assault, bereavement or natural disaster can be extremely damaging, smaller amounts of trauma may help people develop resilience. “Everybody’s heard the aphorism 'whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ ” Mark Seery, a researcher at the University at Buffalo, said. “But in psychology, a lot of ideas that seem like common sense aren’t supported by scientific evidence. “Indeed, a lot of solid research shows that having miserable life experiences is bad for you.
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Study discovers the ordinary psycho
New Zealand Herald: There's more to psychopaths than being murderous. They aren't all as smart as Hannibal Lecter, or evil, and they can change, say researchers. Victoria University Associate Professor Devon Polaschek, one of four authors of research about to be published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, says psychopaths of the popular imagination give the personality disorder a bad name. Patrick Bateman in the film American Psycho inserts a chainsaw into a prostitute. Alex in A Clockwork Orange fantasises about torture and slaughter while listening to music. But psychopaths can wreak havoc in workplaces without stabbing, or eating, their colleagues.
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Research States That Prejudice Comes From a Basic Human Need and Way of Thinking
Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others. In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice since the 1954 publication of an influential book, The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.
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Left-leaning estimations
The Globe and Mail: “If something has gone down in your estimation, check your stance,” says the New Scientist. “Leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate everything from the height of buildings to the number of Michael Jackson chart-toppers. To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while [standing] on a Wii-console balance board.
