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3-D Avatars Could Put You in Two Places at Once
The New York Times: If Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson are right, here is what’s in store for you and your avatar very soon, probably within the next five years: 1) Without leaving your living room or office, you’ll sit at three-dimensional virtual meetings and classes, looking around the table or the lecture hall at your colleagues’ avatars. 2) Your avatar will be programmed to make a better impression than you could ever manage. 3) While your avatar sits there at the conference table gazing alertly and taking notes, you can do something more important: sleep. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Actions and Personality, East and West
People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds. Cultural differences are evident very deep in the brain, challenging a commonsense notion that culture is skin deep. For decades, psychologists believed that it's natural for humans to see behaviors and automatically link them to personality.
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Why comfort food can actually be good for your emotional health
Yahoo! News Canada: When Drew Barrymore goes through a bad breakup, there are two words that always make her feel better: Kraft Dinner. “[I] head straight for the carbs. Macaroni and cheese. Kraft. Deluxe. The kind with the cheese you squeeze out of a bag that takes at least a month to pass through your body,” the actress told Marie Claire in 2009. While the “Charlie’s Angels” star singles out her preference for the gooey stuff, she’s certainly not alone when it comes to seeking solace in comfort food. Countless heartbreaks have been soothed with a wooden spoon in one hand and a giant vat of carbohydrates in the other.
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Survey: Your Biggest Regrets, and How to Make Them Work for You
TIME: Regret is as universal an emotion as love or fear, and it can be nearly as powerful. So, in a new paper, two researchers set about trying to figure out what the typical American regrets most. In telephone surveys, Neal Roese, a psychologist and professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Mike Morrison, a doctoral candidate in psychology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, asked 370 Americans, aged 19 to 103, to talk about their most notable regret. Participants were asked what the regret was, when it happened, whether it was a result of something they did or didn't do, and whether it was something that could still be fixed.
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On the Trail of the Orchid Child
Scientific papers tend to be loaded with statistics and jargon, so it’s always a delightful surprise to stumble on a nugget of poetry in an otherwise technical report. So it was with a 2005 paper in the journal Development and Psychopathology, drily titled “Biological sensitivity to context.” The authors of the research paper, human development specialists Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona and W. Thomas Boyce of Berkeley, borrowed a bit of Swedish idiom to name a startling new concept in genetics and child development: orkidebarn.
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Genetic roots of ‘orchid’ children
Science News: A Swedish expression that translates as “orchid child” refers to a youngster who blossoms spectacularly if carefully nurtured but withers badly if neglected. Scientists have now identified gene variants that may help to cultivate orchid children by heightening their sensitivity to both good and bad parenting. In a group of kids tracked from ages 5 to 17, those who inherited certain forms of a gene involved in learning and memory and had inattentive parents displayed higher rates of delinquency and aggression than their peers, says a team led by psychologist Danielle Dick of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
