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Internet Use in Class Tied to Lower Test Scores
Students who surfed the web in a college course had lower scores on the final exam than did those who didn’t go online.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Oxytocin Receptor Gene (OXTR) and Face Recognition Roeland J. Verhallen, Jenny M. Bosten, Patrick T. Goodbourn, Adam J. Lawrance-Owen,Gary Bargary, and J. D. Mollon A recent study by Skuse and colleagues found an association between face recognition and a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) called rs237887 in a group of high-functioning children with autism and their first-degree relatives. In that study, Skuse and colleagues used the Warrington Recognition Memory Test for Faces to examine face recognition.
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The trolley problem: would you kill one person to save many others?
The Guardian: In the 2015 British thriller Eye in the Sky, a military team locates a terrorist cell preparing an attack expected to kill hundreds. They command a drone that can drop a bomb on the terrorists, preventing their attack. As the team readies the bomb, their cameras spy a little girl selling bread within the blast radius. Should they go through with their mission – killing the girl in order to prevent the deaths of many others? This modern-day moral dilemma has its roots in a classic philosophical thought experiment known as the trolley problem.
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How to Soften the Blow of Bad News
The Wall Street Journal: Imagine that you work at an enjoyable, meaningful job with just one catch: Every so often, you have to punch a colleague in the gut. Many American managers experience something similar: In November, U.S. companies laid off more than 26,000 workers, according to consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Most people on the receiving end probably would have preferred the gut punch. There’s no easy way to tell people things that they don’t want to hear. A few core strategies, however, can help messengers deliver bad news in ways that are less stressful to themselves and more comforting to recipients. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Our growing fascination with boredom
University Affairs: A funny thing happened to Julian Haladyn while researching boredom and art. He got excited. The dull subject was conceptual artist On Kawara’s Today paintings, a series of hundreds of rectangular, solid-coloured canvases – he aimed to make one daily – featuring the day’s date in white. “It was a very boring experience. Your eyes start to glaze over,” says Dr. Haladyn, an OCAD University lecturer, of attending a Kawara exhibition in person. Dr. Haladyn was doing research for his 2012 PhD thesis, and it was during that work that he came across the image of a Kawara painting featuring his birthday – different year, but the right day.
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Bad People Are Disgusting, Bad Actions Are Angering
A person’s character, more so than their actions, determines whether we find immoral acts to be ‘disgusting,’ studies show.
