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How Your Cell Phone Hurts Your Relationships
Scientific American: Most of us are no stranger to this scenario: A group of friends sits down to a meal together, laughing, swapping stories, and catching up on the news – but not necessarily with the people in front of them! Nowadays, it’s not unusual to have one’s phone handy on the table, easily within reach for looking up movie times, checking e-mails, showing off photos, or taking a call or two. It’s a rare person who doesn’t give in to a quick glance at the phone every now and then. Today’s multifunctional phones have become an indispensable lifeline to the rest of the world.
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Quand les mots effacent les peurs (When words fade fears)
Le Figaro: La parole apaise la colère», disait Eschyle. Elle pourrait également apaiser les craintes, d'après une étude américaine parue dans la revue Pyschological Science : des phobiques des araignées ont en effet réussi à maîtriser leur peur, simplement en la verbalisant. Et plus les mots étaient francs, plus l'effet était important. L'équipe du Dr. Katerina Kircanski à l'Université de Californie, Los Angeles a soumis 88 arachnophobes à une véritable épreuve: approcher le plus près possible d'une tarentule vivante dans un bocal ouvert situé en plein air.
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Consumer Product Safety Commission begins to consider bans in addition to warning labels
The Washington Post: Today, warnings are so pervasive that they’ve become a nearly meaningless safety tool in some areas, more useful in protecting manufacturers against legal liability than in guarding consumers from harm, according to David Egilman, a clinical professor at Brown University’s family medicine department who has researched industry’s influence on warnings. “If everything you pick up has a warning on it, you’re going to instinctively ignore all warnings,” Egilman said. “That’s the real problem.” It’s the classic “cry wolf” situation, said Richard Thompson, a psychology and biological sciences professor at the University of Southern California.
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Can watching the news can make you sick?
Yahoo: Watching the evening news can be a harrowing experience. Sometimes it seems like the world is rife with disaster, war, violence and nothing else, and the advent of 24-hour news networks means we can tune in anytime. Many of us do consume hours of news a day, and now the results of a new study indicate that watching extensive coverage of violent images of war and disaster can have negative health impacts.
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The secret of beating fear? Just talk about your emotions, say researchers
The Daily Mail: Simply describing your feelings at stressful times can make you less anxious, researchers have claimed. UCLA research into people who were terrified of spiders found that by simply talking about their fear, they were able to deal with it - and even touch a tarantula. The psychologists asked 88 people with a fear of spiders to approach a large, live tarantula in an open container outdoors. The participants were told to walk closer and closer to the spider and eventually touch it if they could. The subjects were then divided into four groups and sat in front of another tarantula in a container in an indoor setting. Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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Misinformation: Psychological Science Shows Why It Sticks and How to Fix It
Childhood vaccines do not cause autism. Global warming is confirmed by science. And yet, many people believe claims to the contrary. Why does misinformation stick?
