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Study: Regrets? Women have a few, particularly in romance
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES: When you look at the couch and the stomach-scratching blob lying there, do you occasionally wish you’d committed to sharing your life with someone else? When it comes to regrets — particularly among women — romance is the most common source of that nagging anxiety, according to a new study by a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Some 370 adults across the United States — ranging in age from 20 to 80 — were asked in a telephone survey to list their biggest regrets, and the most frequently mentioned issue had to do with romance, said the study’s author, Neil Roese, a professor of marketing at Northwestern.
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What’s Your Biggest Regret?
The New York Times: We all have regrets, but new research suggests the most common regret among American adults involves a lost romantic opportunity. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collected data from 370 adults in the United States during a telephone survey. They asked respondents to describe one memorable regret, explaining what it was, how it happened and whether their regret stemmed from something they did or didn’t do. The most common regret involved romance, with nearly one in five respondents telling a story of a missed love connection.
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The Brain Is Not an Explanation
Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked. This headline appeared in The Guardian a couple years ago above a science story that began: “Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain.” The story went on to describe a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of chocoholics and non-cravers. The study found increased activity in the pleasure centers of the chocoholics’ brains, and the Guardian report concluded: “There may be some truth in calling the love of chocolate an addiction in some people.” Really? Is that a fair conclusion to draw from the fMRI data in this study, reported in the European Journal of Neuroscience?
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How Sports May Focus the Brain
The New York Times: Who can cross a busy road better, a varsity wrestler or a psychology major? That question, which seems to beg for a punch line, actually provided the motivation for an unusual and rather beguiling new experiment in which student athletes were pitted against regular collegians in a test of traffic-dodging skill. The results were revelatory. For the study,published last week in The Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recruited 36 male and female students, ages 18 to 22.
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Does Belief in Free Will Lead to Action?
Free will may be an illusion. Yet we persist in believing we are the masters of our fates—and that belief affects how we act. Think you determine the course of your life and you’re likely to work harder toward your goals and feel better about yourself too. Think you don’t, and you’re likelier to behave in ways that fulfill that prophesy. “Folk psychology tells us if you feel in control, you perform better,” says Davide Rigoni, an experimental psychologist now at the University of Marseille.
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How comfort foods beat the blues
The Telegraph: It works by reminding people of their childhood actually fight feelings of isolation by making people feel like they belong. Psychologists at the University of Buffalo in the US wanted to find out if food could have a similar effect on people as watching their favourite television show or looking at photographs and mementos of friends and family. In one experiment, researchers tried to make some participants feel lonely by having them write for six minutes about a fight with someone close to them. Others were given an emotionally neutral writing assignment. Read the whole story: The Telegraph
