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The ‘Snowmageddon Effect’: Irrational Beliefs About Climate
On February 5th and 6th of 2010, a blizzard dumped historic snowfalls on the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. Elkridge, Maryland, got more than 38” over the two days, and Washington, DC, where I live, ended up with about 20” of accumulation. That’s a lot of snow for us, but this was just the start. Three days later, another winter storm dumped an additional 20” or more on the nation’s capital. The weather’s one-two punch soon became known as “Snowmageddon”—a nickname made official when President Obama used it to describe the paralyzing storms. Snowmageddon had a puzzling side effect.
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Cleansing the Soul by Hurting the Flesh: The Guilt-Reducing Effect of Pain
Lent in the Christian tradition is a time of sacrifice and penance. It also is a period of purification and enlightenment. Pain purifies. It atones for sin and cleanses the soul. Or at least that’s the idea. Theological questions aside, can self-inflicted pain really alleviate the guilt associated with immoral acts? A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explores the psychological consequences of experiencing bodily pain.
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Why are overheard mobile chats so annoying?
The Irish Times: It’s often the prelude to a loud, mundane and frankly irritating half-conversation that commuters within earshot have to witness. Whether it’s the minutae of the person’s oh-so-interesting day, blow-by-blow details of some argument being rehashed with dramatic effect or just other inane waffle, it’s the kind of anti-social annoyance that can turn a pleasant journey into an endurance test. Read the whole story: The Irish Times
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Does Your Partner Hold Grudges? Blame It on His Mother
TIME: All couples fight, and how you recover from a tiff has a lot to do with the health of your relationship. It also has a lot to do with Mom: those partners who are able to bounce back quickest are likely to have had more secure relationships with their caregivers as infants, according to new research in the journal Psychological Science. Researchers at the University of Minnesota zeroed in on a group of people they've been tracking since before they were born in the mid-1970s.
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People Would Rather Let Bad Things Happen Than Cause Them, Especially if Someone Is Watching
People are more comfortable committing sins of omission than commission—letting bad things happen rather than actively causing something bad. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that this is because they know other people will think worse of them if they do something bad than if they let something bad happen. “Omissions and commissions come up relatively frequently in everyday life, and we sometimes puzzle over them,” says moral psychologist Peter DeScioli of Brandeis University, who conducted the study with John Christner and Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Therapist-free therapy
The Economist: THE treatment, in the early 1880s, of an Austrian hysteric called Anna O is generally regarded as the beginning of talking-it-through as a form of therapy. But psychoanalysis, as this version of talk therapy became known, is an expensive procedure. Anna’s doctor, Josef Breuer, is estimated to have spent over 1,000 hours with her. Since then, things have improved. A typical course of a modern talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, consists of 12-16 hour-long sessions and is a reasonably efficient way of treating conditions like depression and anxiety (hysteria is no longer a recognised diagnosis). Medication, too, can bring rapid change.
