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Hunger Affects What We See
Scientific American: Hunger is the best sauce. And it affects perceptions of anything related to food. Even words. Researchers tested two groups. One group just had lunch. The other hadn't eaten in four hours. The subjects watched computer screens as 80 words flashed by, each for about 1/300th of a second--that's too short to read the words, but just long enough to reach the threshold of conscious awareness. One quarter of the words were food-related. The rest were neutral non-food related words. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Girls asking, ‘Am I pretty?’ in online videos face thousands of vitriolic responses
The Washington Post: NEW YORK — The young girl shows off her big, comfy koala hat and forms playful hearts with her fingers as she drops the question on YouTube: “Am I pretty or ugly?” “A lot of people call me ugly, and I think I am ugly. I think I’m ugly, and fat,” she confesses in a tiny voice as she invites the world to decide. And the world did. The video, posted Dec. 17, 2010, has more than 4 million views and more than 107,000 anonymous, often hateful responses in a troubling phenomenon that has girls as young as 10 — and some boys — asking the same question on YouTube with similar results. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Still hungry? More Americans are having a ‘second breakfast’
USA Today: Sometimes one breakfast isn't enough. So why not sneak in a second or a third? On-the-go Americans increasingly are consuming their morning calories over several hours instead of sitting down to devour a plate of pancakes, bacon and eggs in one sitting. The case of the morning munchies is being fueled by the belief that it's healthier to eat several smaller meals instead of three squares a day. What qualifies as a snack or a meal is a matter of perspective, of course. But food companies are rolling out smaller bites that feed the growing appetite for morning snacks. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Stumped by a Problem? This Technique Unsticks You
Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts. “There’s a classic obstacle to innovation called ‘functional fixedness,’ which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts. It hinders people from solving problems.” McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the “generic parts technique” (GPT), which he describes in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. The article also reports on McCaffrey’s test of GPT’s effectiveness.
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Does Preschool Matter?
Wired: For many kids, the most important years of schooling come before they can even read. Consider the groundbreaking work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has repeatedly documented the power of early childhood education. One of his best case studies is the Perry Preschool Experiment, which looked at 123 low-income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan.
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Study of the Day: Why That Last Piece of Chocolate Tastes the Best
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: Our fondest memories usually involve the last of something, be it a farewell kiss or the final day of school. Does this last-is-best bias extend to more trivial events in everyday life? METHODOLOGY: University of Michigan psychologists Ed O'Brien and Phoebe C. Ellsworth recruited 52 students for a taste test of Hershey's Kisses to see if even the smallest of endings have a "positivity effect." The experimenters drew five chocolates -- milk, dark, crème, caramel, and almond -- in random order from a hidden pocket inside a bag without sharing to the participants how many chocolates there would be.
