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On 9/11, Americans may not have been as angry as you thought they were
On September 11, 2001, the air was sizzling with anger—and the anger got hotter as the hours passed. That, anyway, was one finding of a 2010 analysis by Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, and Boris Egloff of 85,000 pager messages sent that day. The researchers employed a commonly used tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, which teases out information from the frequency of word usages in texts. But were Americans really so angry? Clemson University psychologist Cynthia L. S. Pury wasn’t out to answer this question when she made the discovery that was just published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Gesünder leben
Shweizer Familie: Die Hand greift morgens wieder einmal zum Buttergipfeli anstatt zum Dinkelbrötchen. Mittags in der Kantine duftet die Bratwurst mit Zwiebelsauce einfach besser als der Zander auf Spinat. Mit dem Lift geht es zurück in den dritten Stock, obwohl man sich vorgenommen hatte, die Treppe zu nehmen. Und das Joggen nach der Arbeit fällt flach, weil der Kollege spontan zu einem Feierabendbier einlädt. Die meisten Menschen wissen, wie man schlank bleibt und sich vor Volkskrankheiten wie Bluthochdruck, Schlaganfall oder Diabetes schützt: weniger Zucker und Fett essen, fünf Portionen Früchte und Gemüse am Tag, Vollkornbrot statt Weissbrot, Wasser statt Cola – und genügend Bewegung.
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Study links willingness to cheat, viewpoint on God
Los Angeles Times: A new study on the link between one's view of God and willingness to cheat on a test is the latest example of social scientists wading into the highly charged field of religion and morality. The study, titled "Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior" was peer reviewed and published earlier this month in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. In line with many previous studies, it found no difference between the ethical behavior of believers and nonbelievers. But those who believed in a loving, compassionate God were more likely to cheat than those who believed in an angry, punitive God.
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Hazy Recall as a Signal Foretelling Depression
The New York Times: OXFORD, England — The task given to participants in an Oxford University depression study sounds straightforward. After investigators read them a cue word, they have 30 seconds to recount a single specific memory, meaning an event that lasted less than one day. Cues may be positive (“loved”), negative (“heartless”) or neutral (“green”). For “rejected,” one participant answered, “A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with my boss, and my ideas were rejected.” Another said, “My brothers are always talking about going on holiday without me.” The second answer was wrong — it is not specific, and it refers to something that took place on several occasions.
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The Tricky Chemistry of Attraction
The Wall Street Journal: Much of the attraction between the sexes is chemistry. New studies suggest that when women use hormonal contraceptives, such as birth-control pills, it disrupts some of these chemical signals, affecting their attractiveness to men and women's own preferences for romantic partners. The type of man a woman is drawn to is known to change during her monthly cycle—when a woman is fertile, for instance, she might look for a man with more masculine features. Taking the pill or another type of hormonal contraceptive upends this natural dynamic, making less-masculine men seem more attractive, according to a small but growing body of evidence.
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How Right and Left Shape Right and Wrong
The Wall Street Journal: “The wise man’s heart is at his right hand,” says Ecclesiastes, “but the fool’s heart is at his left.” Islamic law says that Muslims should use their right hands alone for eating and drinking, because Satan uses his left. We may think that the preference for “right” over “left” is purely cultural, but, in fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that it is shaped by our bodily experience. Experiments find that right-handed people—and something like 90% of the population is right-handed—unconsciously prefer people and objects placed to their right; meanwhile, left-handers prefer people and things to their left. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
