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Going Through the Motions Improves Dance Performance
Expert ballet dancers seem to glide effortlessly across the stage, but learning the steps is both physically and mentally demanding. New research suggests that dance marking -- loosely practicing a routine by “going through the motions” -- may improve the quality of dance performance by reducing the mental strain needed to perfect the movements. The new findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that marking may alleviate the conflict between the cognitive and physical aspects of dance practice, allowing dancers to memorize and repeat steps more fluidly.
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Ein Gorilla in der Lunge (A gorilla in the lungs)
Suddeutsche Zeitung: Das Offensichtliche trägt ein zotteliges Kostüm, stellt sich in die Mitte des Bildes und trommelt sich auf die Brust. Und was passiert? Die meisten Probanden dieses längst klassischen Tests von 1999 übersehen die Frau im Gorillakostüm, weil sie mit einer Aufgabe beschäftigt sind. Die Teilnehmer dieser Studie der Psychologen Daniel Simons und Christopher Chabris zählten die Pässe, die drei Basketballspieler in weißen T-Shirts einander zuspielten. Eine fordernde Aufgabe, denn es waren auch drei Spieler in schwarzen Hemden im Bild, die ebenfalls einen Ball hin und herwarfen.
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About-Face: Rethinking Emotions
wbur: Nearly a half-century ago, a psychologist named Paul Ekman set out to see if human beings, from Papua New Guinea to Pittsburgh, showed emotions in the same way. He went around the world, showing photographs of faces and asked people to identify the emotions shown: fear, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise. What he found, in short, was that emotions are universal. It became one of the most recognized psychological works in the world. The findings are in the first chapter in most psychology textbooks. They’re the basis for the multimillion-dollar industry built on studying facial expressions, taught to FBI agents, marketing executives, cops and spies. And they might be all wrong.
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When Good Pictures Happen to Bad People: Why We Hate That We Like The Rolling Stone Cover
TIME: His dark eyes stare straight at the lens, his hair tousled so it falls just-so to one side, just as any teen idol or rock star would want to debut on a national magazine cover. He’s called a “monster,” but the Rolling Stone cover image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shows anything but such a beast. And that’s why people are so uncomfortable with it. … While seeing an attractive picture of a villainous person isn’t likely to change our opinion of that individual’s egregious acts, as the uproar over the image indicates, it could lead us to feel some emotions that we may not think are appropriate.
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Why College Students Make Better Decisions Than Intelligence Agents
Yahoo: Who would you trust with the lives of hundreds of people: federal intelligence agents or a bunch of college students? At Cornell University, psychologist Valerie Reyna wanted to test whether intelligence agents were susceptible to a type of decision-making bias people accrue as they get older. It's called fuzzy thinking. As our life experience grows more robust, we tend to make decisions off of gists, rather than analytical lines of thought. Read the whole story: Yahoo
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Booze, Binging and the Devil You Don’t Know
Imagine this scenario. You are meeting your boyfriend at a restaurant, intending to break up with him. You know this conversation is going to be tough, but you really don’t know what his reaction will be. He could end up sobbing, or shouting, or he could just sit there in uncomfortable silence. You arrive early and order a whiskey—a double—to steady your nerves. Will the whiskey have its desired effect? Drinkers clearly expect that alcohol will dampen the effects of stress—they often drink for precisely that reason—but in fact this dynamic is poorly understood.
