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Quick Tip: Give It a Rest to Boost Memory
Men's Fitness: Studying for exams or a big presentation? Don’t forget to give it a rest … your brain, that is. New research shows that even a quick 10-minute break after learning can boost your memory—up to a week later. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland asked healthy elderly men and women to listen to two stories, and remember the details later. After one story, participants rested with their eyes closed for 10 minutes in a dark room. After the other story, they looked for differences between two images, an activity meant to distract their minds.
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Sexy Movies Sway Teens to Have Earlier and Riskier Sex
LiveScience: The amount of sex kids see in movies could influence their sexual behavior later in life, a new study says. In the study, young teens who watched movies with more sexual content tended to become sexually active at an earlier age, and engaged in riskier sexual behaviors, compared with those who watched movies with less sexual content. The study found an association, and not a cause-effect link. However, "sensation seeking, or the tendency to seek more novel and intense sexual stimulation, does seem to increase in young people who watched more movies with sexually explicit content," said study researcher Ross O'Hara, a researcher at the University of Missouri.
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Pressed for time? Take a moment to feel awe
NBC: If you're feeling pressed for time, try hiking to a mountain vista or listening to a masterful symphony. New research suggests that the resulting awe may leave you feeling less rushed. Experiencing awe makes people feel as if time is plentiful, according to a new study to be published in the journal Psychological Science. Not many emotions make people feel that way, study researcher Melanie Rudd, a graduate student in business at Stanford University, told LiveScience. "We kind of run around with these very hectic day-to-day lives," Rudd said.
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Grin and Bear It! Smiling Facilitates Stress Recovery
Just grin and bear it! At some point, we have all probably heard or thought something like this when facing a tough situation. But is there any truth to this piece of advice? Feeling good usually makes us smile, but does it work the other way around? Can smiling actually make us feel better? In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman of the University of Kansas investigate the potential benefits of smiling by looking at how different types of smiling, and the awareness of smiling, affects individuals’ ability to recover from episodes of stress.
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Awe Slows Down Time, Boosts Life Satisfaction: Study
Huffington Post: Think back to your last jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring moment -- was it gazing across vast stretches of ocean, or into the deep voids of a canyon? A new study in the journal Psychological Science shows that those feelings of awe seem to slow down time and boost feelings of life satisfaction. "...Awe offset the feeling that time is limited, which increased willingness to volunteer time, accentuated preferences for experiential goods, and lifted satisfaction with life," the researchers, from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota, wrote in the study. The study included three experiments.
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Mind games of the victorious
Chicago Tribune: For decades after the first sports psychology lab was established in 1920 in Germany, mental coaches have been the water boys of sports science, viewed by their colleagues as not quite good enough to make the first-string team. That has changed. Virtually every top professional team and elite athlete has a psychologist on speed dial for help conquering the yips - when stress makes crucial muscles jerk and ruins, say, an archery shot - marshal the power of visualization, or just muster the confidence that can mean the difference between medaling or just muddling through.
