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Want to lose weight? Shut your mouth
CNN: Anita Mills was 382 pounds when a family doctor gave her four simple rules to lose weight: 1. Eat 8 ounces of food every 3 hours 2. No sugary drinks 3. Do not skip meals 4. Do not tell anyone what you're doing Now 242 pounds lighter, Mills credits that last tip for helping her through the most difficult months of her weight loss journey. Not having someone questioning every bite or trying to persuade her to relax on weekends helped her focus on the goal. Read the whole story: CNN
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Did journalism sink your 401k? And more surprising insights from the social sciences
Boston Globe: Learning to love the rules We all chafe against the rules sometimes, but new research suggests that restrictions are a lot easier to accept than the possibility of restrictions. In one experiment, people read about the prospect of lower speed limits that were either certain to happen or likely to happen. If the lower limits were certain, people had a more positive attitude about them, whereas if the lower limits were likely but not certain, people were more negative. In another experiment, people read about the prospect of a ban on cellphone use while driving.
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Super memory, obsessive behavior: Do they share brain space?
Los Angeles Times: Memory researchers at the University of California Irvine are developing a large collection of remarkable research subjects, who themselves maintain a remarkably large collection of memories. They are people with "highly superior autobiographical memories," and UC Irvine researchers so far have found at least 22 -- and possibly as many as 32 subjects in this country alone -- who can remember with extraordinary accuracy and in extraordinary detail the events of their lives and the days on which they occurred.
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Fetus can sense how Mom’s doing psychologically
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Science has learned that a developing fetus receives messages from the mother, everything from hearing mom's heartbeat to the music she might direct toward her belly. But a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the fetus can pick up on signals and respond to a mother experiencing depression. Researchers at the University of California-Irvine recruited pregnant women and checked them for depression before and after the mothers delivered their babies. They also tested the babies after delivery to see how their development was progressing. Read the whole story: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
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The First Step to Change: Focusing On the Negative
If you want people to change the current system, or status quo, first you have to get them to notice what’s wrong with it. That’s the idea behind a new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds that people pay attention to negative information about the system when they believe the status quo can change. “Take America’s educational system. You could find some flaws in that system,” says India Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University who did the new study with Professor Kentaro Fujita. “But we have to live with it every day, so people tend to focus on the positive and reinforce the system.
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Wealth inequality: also going up
The Washington Post: Of late, James Pethokoukis, the American Enterprise Institute’s resident economics blogger, has been attempting to “close the case on the inequality myth.” Wednesday’s edition argues that it doesn’t really matter if income inequality has gone up because wealth inequality fell after World War II. I don’t agree with that, but put it aside for a moment.
