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How your Facebook profile picture predicts future happiness
National Post: You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but a new study suggests you can judge future happiness by a Facebook photo. Reporting in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers find that smile intensity from a single profile picture can predict how satisfied a person will be with their life nearly four years later. The insight to future well-being replicates a link revealed in earlier research with formal portraits, sparking renewed interest in the information coded in human faces.
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Want To Resist Temptation? A New Study Suggests Thinking Might Not Always Help You
Uh-oh. Here comes temptation—for a dieter, it’s a sweet treat; an alcoholic, a beer; a married man, an attractive, available woman. How to defeat the impulse to gratify desire and stick to your long-term goals of slimness, sobriety, or fidelity? Here’s some advice: Don’t stop and think. Thinking may not help. That is one surprising conclusion of a new study by Loran Nordgren and Eileen Chou at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Nordgren and Chou wanted to make sense of two contradictory bodies of literature.
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From Halloween to Horror Movies, Why We Love to Be Afraid
ABC News: On any gloomy day, Michele Sinesky asks her husband to find a good monster movie on television -- "The Thing" or "The Tingler." "You name it, I've seen it twice," said the 63-year-old grandmother of four from Charlottesville, Va. "For one thing, it's an old-time memory back to my childhood when we kids would tell each other spooky stories late at night at sleepovers -- the sense of someone saying 'boo' to you." "But I also get an adrenaline rush when the monster jumps out at me," said Sinesky.
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Should You Quit Taking Vitamins?
Yahoo! Health: I'm a big fan of vitamins. And judging by the size of the vitamin and supplement industry—$20 billion in annual sales, a quarter of that in multivitamins—so are you. Pop one pill and you get a day’s worth of nutrients. What’s not to love? Well, there is this: A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that taking multivitamins and other supplements may actually shorten your life. Uh-oh. Researchers in the study collected information from nearly 40,000 women (but say the findings apply to men too) several times over 22 years. They asked about all sorts of health issues, including vitamin and supplement use.
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Fedeltà, orgasmo, partner i luoghi comuni sfatati dalla scienza
La Repubblica: Il cantautore Cesare Cremonini non è più l'unico a credere che gli uomini e le donne siano uguali: a fargli eco sono anche gli scienziati. Negli ultimi 20 anni, molti studi hanno dimostrato che, quando si tratta di sesso, maschi e femmine pensano e agiscono in modo simile. I 'miti' del diverso approccio dei generi (lui più interessato al sesso, lei all'amore e così via) sono dunque destinato ad essere soppiantati dalla schiettezza della ricerca che, una volta tanto, vede i dati provenienti da più laboratori andar tutti nella stessa direzione.
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A World Series to Remember?
It’s a moment burned into the minds of Red Sox and Yankee fans alike – sitting inches away from the television, fists clenched, tightness in the chest and the unbearable urge to look away… It might have been that very moment in 2003 when the Yankee’s Aaron Boone hit a game ending home run. Or it might have been that very moment in 2004, when Boston’s Pokey Reese threw to first base for the last Yankee out, and the devastation of 2003 began to fade from the memories of so many Red Sox fans. Either way, a new study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, says it is the games our teams win that we remember, not the games our teams lose.
