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Holiday hype is like sex, you have to get in the mood
The Globe and Mail: I’m beginning to believe in the Ho Ho Hump – that point in the preholiday hype when one gives in and embraces the festive season. I’m convinced that there is such a thing. It’s just that some canny retailer has yet to devise an annoying ad campaign about it. (There’s always time – just under four weeks to be exact – so don’t feel too relieved. Yet.) You succumb to the tinsel brigade. You can hear the jingles in Canadian Tire and not want to head directly for the exit. You can look at those SUVs with the wreath strapped to the front grill and the perky soccer mom at the wheel, and not wearily sigh at the in-your-face (and in your rearview mirror) gung-ho-ness of mirth.
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Creative Thinkers More Likely to Cheat
LiveScience: When it comes t0 money, creative people are more likely to cheat to get it than the less-imaginative crowd, a new study suggests. The reason? Creative types may be more skilled at coming up with reasons for their less-than-ethical actions, according to the researchers. In the new study, scientists measured the intelligence and creativity of 97 students from local universities in the southeastern United States by asking them to complete a series of recognized psychological tests. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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The moral climate
National Post: The 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that begins this week in Durban isn't expected to see much progress in replacing Kyoto. For those who believe that the Kyoto process is politically dangerous, economically destructive and based on dubious science, this is a good thing. Nevertheless, there is bound to be plenty of hand-wringing over the failure of rich countries to hand over more cash to poor ones as "compensation" for the climate catastrophe to come.
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A Vaccination Against Social Prejudice
Evolutionary psychologists suspect that prejudice is rooted in survival: Our distant ancestors had to avoid outsiders who might have carried disease. Research still shows that when people feel vulnerable to illness, they exhibit more bias toward stigmatized groups. But a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science suggests there might be a modern way to break that link. “We thought if we could alleviate concerns about disease, we could also alleviate the prejudice that arises from them,” says Julie Y. Huang of the University of Toronto, about a study she conducted with Alexandra Sedlovskaya of Harvard University; Joshua M.
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Why Do We Give? Not Why Or How You Think
NPR: New findings in the science of charity reveals some counter-intuitive results. For instance, people will give more money to a single suffering person than to a population of suffering people, and also give more when some type of physical discomfort — for example, running a marathon — is involved. GUY RAZ, HOST: This time of year, pleas for donations are as plentiful as eggnog and door-buster sales. Americans give around $300 billion a year to charity. And as NPR's Alix Spiegel reports, psychologists have started to look more closely at when and why we're motivated to give.
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Chicken Soup for the Lonely Soul: Why Comfort Food Works
Scientific American: My grandmother was born in Sobrance, in what was then called Czechoslovakia on November 5, 1930. She grew up in ten kilometers away, in a small town called Nagy-Muzsaly. Her father’s family were landowners, something that was very rare for Jewish families at the time, and they used that land to produce wine. My grandmother’s family led simple lives. All that changed, though, when my grandmother was 13 years old. On the last day of Passover in 1944, my grandmother and her family were first deported by the Nazis.