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The Idea of Racial Hierarchy Remains Entrenched in Americans’ Psyches
Pacific Standard: Remember all that talk about how the United States is becoming a post-racial society? New research throws cold water on the concept, suggesting that, at least on an unconscious level, Americans retain their belief in a race-based hierarchy. In a large-scale study measuring implicit judgments, Americans—not surprisingly—showed a strong liking for their own racial group. But beyond that bias, their answers revealed a consistent set of racial rankings, with whites being most associated with positive thoughts, followed by Asians. Surprisingly, African-Americans did not end up at the bottom of the list.
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Latest research: Why everyone should take vacation
The Washington Post: We Americans work hard. Weekends are more like workends. We sleep with our smartphones. And we think vacations are for wimps. So we don’t take them. Or take work along with us if we do. But what if taking vacation not only made you healthier and happier, as a number of studies have shown, but everyone around you? And what if everybody took vacation at the same time? Would life be better, not just for you, but for the entire society? Yes, argues Terry Hartig, an environmental psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. Yes, indeed. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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When Kids Start Playing To Win
NPR: This week, NPR Ed is focusing on questions about why people play and how play relates to learning. It's a playful word that's developed something of a bad reputation: "competition." The fear among some parents is that, once children start playing to win, at around 5 years old, losing isn't just hard. It's devastating. To explain what competition means to the average 5-year-old, I'm going to invoke an adult known for his ferocity on the playing field, a titan of competition: Vince Lombardi. The football legend and former coach of the Green Bay Packers didn't just win the Super Bowl; he won thefirst Super Bowl. And then he won the second one.
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All-Nighters Could Alter Your Memories
Scientific American: People who don't get enough sleep could be increasing their risk of developing false memories, a new study finds. In the study, when researchers compared the memory of people who'd had a good night's sleep with the memory of those who hadn't slept at all, they found that, under certain conditions, sleep-deprived individuals mix fact with imagination, embellish events and even "remember" things that never actually happened. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Attention, please. You will find it rewarding
Wired: We are what we attend to. What we pay attention to drives our behaviour and affects how we feel. We often pay attention to what we think will make us happy, such as new gadgets, rather than to those stimuli that actually do make us happy, such as old friends. This prevents us from having the happiest experiences in life that we can. We've all heard about attention deficit disorder. But the modern world is making us all victims of attention distraction disorder. It is so easy to become addicted to checking emails, Twitter and the Facebook updates of your virtual friends. We just can't seem to help ourselves.
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When It’s Bad to Have Good Choices
The New Yorker: It may not surprise you to learn that healthy, well-fed people in affluent countries are often unhappy and anxious. But it did startle Zbigniew Lipowski when he came to a full realization of this fact. He had emigrated to North America from Dublin, in 1955, and, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, was put in charge of the psychiatry practices at two Montreal hospitals, Royal Victoria and Montreal Neurological. Why, he thought, as he worked there, would so many people living in such good conditions have so much anxiety?
