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The Good Fight
The Boston Globe: It starts in childhood: As every kindergartner learns, getting along with others is a practical virtue. From our earliest years, we start to absorb lessons of diplomacy and tact, all meant to help us navigate our surroundings without friction. Down the road, as grown-ups, we seek harmony at home and in the office. Couples who project tranquility are envied, and an unflappable attitude is often a job requirement. Fighting, meanwhile, is perceived as corrosive and stressful. But what if we’re thinking about fighting wrong? What if, as counter intuitive as it seems, certain kinds of fighting are good for us?
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Eggs, Butter, Milk – Memory Is Not Just A Shopping List!
Often, the goal of science is to show that things are not what they seem to be. But now, in an article which will be published in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, a veteran cognitive psychologist exhorts his colleagues in memory research to consult the truth of their own experience. “Cognitive psychologists are trying to be like physicists and chemists, which means doing controlled laboratory experiments, getting numbers out of them and explaining the numbers,” says Douglas L.
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Caregivers of mentally ill carry heavy burden
The Montreal Gazette: Having a brother with schizophrenia has defined Ellen's life. When she's not feeling guilty for having a normal life, she is using all of her time, energy and emotion to cope with her brother's many issues. "There is just no relief," said Ellen, who didn't want her real name used. She is not alone. On the day after comedian Howie Mandel told a Montreal crowd that mental health issues are ubiquitous in today's society, a study shows that caregivers of the mentally ill face a level of burden that is almost off the charts and must learn how to refocus their priorities in order to cope. Read more: The Montreal Gazette
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Using the Psychology of Evil To Do Good
Science: Forty years after presiding over the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, Phil Zimbardo has reinvented himself as a social entrepreneur, leading a new project that will attempt to turn the Stanford Prison Experiment and other studies of the dark side of the human psyche into a force for good. Last year, Zimbardo founded the Heroic Imagination Project, which operates out of a former Army post in San Francisco's Presidio park.
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Power, sex and conventional wisdom
GULF TIMES: Would there be fewer sex scandals if the world were run by women? The question comes to mind in the wake of scandals that involve two powerful men, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and came to light almost simultaneously. Strauss-Kahn resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund four days after being arrested in New York for allegedly trying to rape a hotel maid. Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, admitted having fathered a child with a woman on his household staff.
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The Four Loko Effect
The popular, formerly caffeinated, fruity alcoholic beverage, Four Loko, has been blamed for the spike in alcohol-related hospitalizations, especially throughout college campuses. Initially, caffeine was deemed the culprit and the Food and Drug Administration ordered all traces of caffeine to be removed from Four Loko and all other similar beverages. However, according to an upcoming evaluation in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, caffeine might not be the primary cause of the spike in hospitalizations.
