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Are ‘Hot Hands’ in Sports a Real Thing?
The New York Times: Winning streaks in sports may be more than just magical thinking, several new studies suggest. Whether you call them winning streaks, “hot hands” or being “in the zone,” most sports fans believe that players, and teams, tend to go on tears. Case in point: Nate Robinson’s almost single-handed evisceration of the Miami Heat on Monday night. (Yes, I am a Bulls fan.) But our faith in hot hands is challenged by a rich and well-regarded body of science over the past 30 years, much of it focused on basketball, that tells us our belief is mostly fallacious. ...
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How our expressions help others locate threat
Asian News International: Wide-eyed expressions, which typically signals fear, may enlarge our visual field and mutually enhance others' ability to locate threats, a new research has claimed. The research - conducted by psychology graduate student Daniel Lee of the University of Toronto with advisor Adam Anderson - suggests that wide-eyed expressions of fear are functional in ways that directly benefit both the person who makes the expression and the person who observes it. The findings of the research show that widened eyes provide a wider visual field that can help us locate potential threats in our environment.
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The Biology of Kindness: How It Makes Us Happier & Healthier
TIME: There’s a reason why being kind to others is good for you— and it can now be traced to a specific nerve. When it comes to staying healthy, both physically and mentally, studies consistently show that strong relationships are at least as important as avoiding smoking and obesity. But how does social support translate into physical benefits such as lower blood pressure, healthier weights and other physiological measures of sound health? A new study published in Psychological Science, suggests that the link may follow the twisting path of the vagus nerve, which connects social contact to the positive emotions that can flow from interactions.
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Cognitive Earthquake: Who’s Really in Need?
The Huffington Post: In January 2000, an earthquake shook China's mountainous Yunnan province. It was a moderate earthquake and killed only seven, but it leveled more than 40,000 homes and injured thousands of residents. According to the World Health Organization, as many as 1.8 million were affected by the disaster, and in need of shelter, medical attention or other aid. The scientists have a theory, which is that we respond to deaths more decisively than we respond to other, undefined suffering -- even though it is obviously not the dead who need help. They set out to test this idea, and also to see if there might be a way to increase sensitivity to those left behind.
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Social Connections Drive the ‘Upward Spiral’ of Positive Emotions and Health
People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, led by Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bethany Kok of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences also found it is possible for a person to self-generate positive emotions in ways that make him or her physically healthier. “People tend to liken their emotions to the weather, viewing them as uncontrollable,” says Fredrickson.
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Bouncing Back May Be Tough, but So Are We
The Chronicle of Higher Education: In 2005 the National Science Foundation brought together some unlikely collaborators—ecologists and psychologists among them—to talk about resilience. It turns out they had a lot in common. For decades researchers in each field had been studying the ways in which external events and stresses could transform complex systems. Their conclusions were strikingly similar: Resilience is often the result of a period of stress and change. Just as ecosystems can absorb serious shock and transform into different, but stable versions of themselves, so can people. Resilience, it seems, is hard-wired into us. Read the whole story: The Chronicle of Higher Education
