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In Fantasy Football, More Is More
The New York Times: Fantasy footballers’ search for psychological comfort has a distinct ring to it. It sounds a little something like this: “I’ll never draft Player X.” ... We don’t like choices. We like certainty. We yearn for it, in fact, and we’ll do any manner of mental gymnastics to achieve some level of certainty in our decisions, even if our justifications are illogical. But this reach for certainty – for psychological comfort – can damage your fake football squad. Writing off fantasy commodities without good reason is a hallmark of the loser’s mind-set. And it’s far from rare.
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The Science of Trusting: How Can You Get Some to Trust You?
The Huffington Post: When Joshua Prager was 19, he was an accomplished athlete, and proud of his well-trained physique. His young life was full of promise. That was before an out-of-control truck driver, carrying a four-ton load, crashed into his mini-van and left him a hemiplegic. Following 21 years of difficult recovery, Prager, a writer and journalist, decided to return to Israel to seek out the man, Abed, who had changed his life forever. His moving and popular TEDTalk tells the story of that meeting, and raises complicated questions about human trust and forgiveness. ...
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Memory weakens but steadies with age, study finds
BBC: Older people were more consistent in memory tests, research from Germany shows - although younger people did achieve overall higher test scores. The assessments were carried out in Berlin on 100 older people - aged between 65 and 80 - and 100 people in their 20s. They had to show up at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin for 100 days of tests. "We were very nice to them and had a good atmosphere at the labs," says Prof Florian Schmiedek. ... Prof Schmiedek whose research was published in the journal Psychological Science, was surprised by the difference between the two groups.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Relative Trustworthiness of Inferential Tests of the Indirect Effect in Statistical Mediation Analysis: Does Method Really Matter? Andrew F. Hayes and Michael Scharkow Mediation analysis is commonly used to examine the indirect effect of one variable (X) on a second variable (Y) through a mediator variable (M). Although many researchers conduct mediation analysis, not all do so in the same way. The authors examined the delta method, percentile and bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs), the distribution-of-the-product approach, the Monte Carlo CI, and the test of joint significance.
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Study techniques that work — and (surprisingly) don’t
The Washington Post: Is cramming before a test better than not studying at all? Is underlining material a good way to retain information? A new school year is a good time to look at the latest research on the best ways to study. What works and doesn’t may surprise you. A 2013 study called “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques” and published in “Psychological Science in the Public Interest,” a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, evaluated the 10 most commonly used learning techniques and concluded the following about effectiveness. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Building a Better Mass-Market Tomato
The New York Times: Science is trying to build a better supermarket tomato. At a laboratory here at the University of Florida’s Institute for Plant Innovation, researchers chop tomatoes from nearby greenhouses and plop them into glass tubes to extract flavor compounds — the essence of tomato, so to speak. These flavor compounds are identified and quantified by machine. People taste and rate the hybrid tomatoes grown in the university’s fields. ... From there, Dr.
