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What Do Spoilers Spoil?
The New York Times: Over 10 percent of the comments on my “Hunger Games” column brought up the question of spoiler alerts. “Haven’t you heard of a spoiler alert?”, one exasperated reader asked. Another reader, Jim, reported that he was “trying rapidly to withdraw my forward of the article to my wife who’s in the midst of the 2nd book.” He didn’t want his wife’s experience spoiled as it would be, he assumed, if she knew how things turned out. A recent study indicates that Jim’s assumption may be incorrect.
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Reduce Dumb Decisions by Thinking in a Foreign Language
ABC News: Forget about dropping that Korean or Spanish or Japanese lesson, and not just because sticking with it might make it easier to navigate a polyglot world. It can pay off in other ways too. People who think problems through in a foreign language – and it doesn’t matter which one – make more rational decisions and are more apt to take smart risks, especially in the financial realm, according to a recent study in the journal Psychological Science. Left to follow their gut instincts, people are naturally loss-averse, sometimes myopically so, and often pass up favorable opportunities as a result, says Boaz Keysar, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study.
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Facebook users let secrets out
New Zealand Herald: What you post, comment on and say on Facebook reveals more about your self-esteem than you perhaps realise, psychologists say. In theory, the social networking website seems beneficial for people with low self-esteem, giving them the opportunity to share experiences, thoughts and likes with other users. But a North American study found that, in practice, those with low self-esteem tended to behave counterproductively, bombarding their online friends with "negative tidbits" about their lives and making themselves less likeable.
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Questionable Research Practices Surprisingly Common
Not all scientific misconduct is flat-out fraud. Much falls into the murkier realm of “questionable research practices.” A new study finds that in one field, psychology, these practices are surprisingly common. The survey of more than 2,000 research psychologists, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that most have engaged in at least one of the questionable practices at some point in their career. “There have been some very widely publicized cases of outright fraud,” says Leslie K. John of Harvard Business School.
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Studies probe why people choke in clutch situations
Scripps Howard News Service: When the typically solid free-throw sinker fails to find net in a close game's waning minutes, when the firm's best deal-sealer falters in the final round of negotiations, when a baseball team's closer becomes a blow-ser in the final inning -- the choke talk begins. Psychologists and brain scientists have been working for years to understand why talented, competent people don't rise to the occasion in clutch situations.
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¿Por qué movemos los ojos al pensar?
Yahoo! España: Vas caminando por la calle, un extraño te para y te pregunta cómo llegar a algún punto alejado. Indefectiblemente te detienes a pensar, y tus ojos se mueven involuntariamente a lugares a los que ni siquiera miras en realidad. Llamamos a estos rápidos movimientos oculares sacádicos, y a día de hoy desconocemos su por qué. Investigaciones pasadas, sugerían que los que los movimientos de los ojos hacia la derecha, provocados por el hemisferio cerebral opuesto, se dan cuando una cuestión necesita obtener pensamiento verbal, mientras que los movimientos de los ojos hacia la izquierda implican que el problema requiere del empleo de imágenes visuales.
