-
Stress Changes How People Make Decisions
Trying to make a big decision while you’re also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that. Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome. It’s a bit surprising that stress makes people focus on the way things could go right, says Mara Mather of the University of Southern California, who cowrote the new review paper with Nichole R. Lighthall. “This is sort of not what people would think right off the bat,” Mather says.
-
Economics Made Easy: Think Friction
The New York Times: CRITICS of Mitt Romney’s activities at Bain Capital have been described, somewhat hysterically, as critics of capitalism. They’re not. But they are attacking something. And understanding that something can have enormous implications for the shape of our economic institutions and activities going forward. What Bain Capital, and firms like it, do is try to increase the efficiency of the companies they buy. They try to get more with less — to eliminate waste. They are not interested either in creating jobs or in destroying them. Nor are they interested in improving the lives of consumers by making products and services better and cheaper.
-
Nursing a broken heart? How taking a paracetamol could dull the pain of rejection
Daily Mail: It's what songwriters have been saying for years, and now scientists agree – love really does hurt. But what the ballads don’t tell us is that a simple dose of paracetamol could help ease the pain of a broken heart. The rather prosaic cure emerged in a study by neuroscientists which found that emotional pain is processed in the same area of the brain as physical pain. They also discovered that hurt feelings – such as being dumped by a partner – can respond to painkillers. In a three-week trial at the University of California, 62 people were told to take either Tylenol – the American name for paracetamol – or a placebo and then record how they felt every night.
-
How the Military Can Change Personalities, Slightly
Miller-McCune: What life experience is more immersive than marriage, more prolonged than college, more tightly regimented than the average job? Ah yes — military service, which starts with recruiters boldly announcing their intention to make a new man of every trainee. Surely drill sergeants believe they can change personalities. But psychologists generally believe that our personalities don’t change much over time. Just sticking to the Big Five, we remain mostly agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, neurotic, and open-minded throughout our lives.
-
Oscar psychology: Why celebrities fascinate us
Today: From the Oscar's red carpet to the tabloids lining supermarket checkout lines, celebrity obsession is everywhere. Even the most casual moviegoer might find him or herself flipping through a slideshow of Academy Award fashion after the big event. So why do we fixate on celebrities? In most cases, it's perfectly natural. Humans are social creatures, psychologists say, and we evolved — and still live — in an environment where it paid to pay attention to the people at the top. Celebrity fascination may be an outgrowth of this tendency, nourished by the media and technology. Read the whole story: Today
-
Movies Tuned to Our Brains
The Wall Street Journal: Three seconds is just too long. If this sentence were a Web page and it took that long to finish loading, you'd give up and go get a pizza. In 2000, sure, we'd hang around for eight seconds before clicking away. Now we're done at three. So how, then, are we still able to sit quietly in darkened theaters watching movies that routinely run more than two hours? Since 1928, winners of the Academy Award for best picture have averaged 140 minutes. The longer the luckier, people say. Of this year's nine nominees, just three are under two hours. All must meet stringent criteria to get nominated, of course.
