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Coffee Break? Walk in the Park? Why Unwinding Is Hard
The Wall Street Journal: A college student deep into studying for a big exam might do well to give his brain a break. Just what he does during that break will determine how helpful that pause will be, a growing body of research shows. A stroll in the park could do wonders, for instance, while downing coffee could leave him just as stressed and depleted as before the break. And, sometimes, forcing oneself to simply power through mental fatigue can be more effective than pausing.
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Assigning Wikipedia Instead of Term Papers
Positive Psychology News Daily: Are you a professor teaching a class on psychology — or perhaps another discipline that relies on psychology, such as management science? Are you putting the final tweaks on your course syllabus? Then consider this: Wikipedia has been shown to be the most important source of science including psychological science for the public. However, a lot of topics in psychology are presented poorly or have not been presented at all.
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The Cars
The Colbert Report: Stephen: But now there's a modern way to cram all the data into our sense holes, and it brings us to tonight's Word: Head in the Cloud. Folks, to deal with information overload the human brain uses something called transactive memory, relying on friends and family to remember things you don't have space for, like when a husband remembers to pay the electric bill while the wife remembers everything he's done wrong for the past 10 years. (Like criticizing her on TV) Now our brains are applying the same technique online. It seems that Betsy Sparrow, Columbia researcher and Decemberist song lyric recently publishes a report called Memory in the Age of Google.
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CEO face shape linked to company performance
CBS News: The shape of a CEO's face can predict his company's financial performance, according to a new study in which researchers analyzed photos of 55 male chief executive officers of Fortune 500 businesses. The crucial feature: Facial width. Corporate leaders with faces that were wide relative to their length — such as Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines — tended to lead better-performing companies than CEOs with narrower faces, such as Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers, the study found. This finding follows research that has shown that the ratio of facial width to height is correlated with aggression in men.
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Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely
NPR: We've all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And still other kids learn best when lessons involve movement. But should teachers target instruction based on perceptions of students' strengths? Several psychologists say education could use some "evidence-based" teaching techniques, not unlike the way doctors try to use "evidence-based medicine." Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we're on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn.
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Men and women take different risks: study
Calgary Herald: A growing number of studies suggest that having women in a company's boardroom and executive suites fundamentally changes a corporation's decision-making process - and can improve the balance sheet too. While this is usually attributed to the fact that women take fewer risks than men, a study published this month suggests the stereotype of women as cautious riskavoiders misses the mark. Bernd Figner, a scientist at the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School, who studies when and how people take risks, suggests women are every bit as likely to step outside their security zones as men - the two sexes just do so in different ways.
