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Quicksilver message: How to send a public health warning
When I was a smoker, I paid no attention to the constant health warnings about tobacco. It’s not that I was unaware that cigarettes posed serious risks. They were spelled out in black-and-white, right there on my pack of Camels. I just put them out of my mind—for future consideration. I quit smoking long ago. The years have made me more averse to health risks in general, and I take precautions when I can. For example, I’ve seriously cut back on canned tuna in my diet, based on what I’ve read about mercury risks. The idea of quicksilver in my tuna fish sandwich makes me uneasy. Mine are the kinds of decisions that drive public health officials crazy.
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Psychologists link spatial perception to claustrophobic fear
Daily News & Analysis: People who project their personal space too far beyond their bodies, or the norm of arm's reach, are more likely to experience claustrophobic fear, according to psychologists. "We've found that people who are higher in claustrophobic fear have an exaggerated sense of the near space surrounding them," said Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco, who led the research. "At this point, we don't know whether it's the distortion in spatial perception that leads to the fear, or vice versa. Both possibilities are likely," she said. Read the whole story: Daily News & Analysis
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Empathy and torture
The Economist: EMPATHY is often confused with sympathy in Washington and derided as a trait of bleeding-heart liberals. But whereas sympathy can be uninformed—"I could never imagine what she is going through"—empathy is the ability to identify with the experiences and feelings of another person. And, in general, we humans are pretty bad at it. Study after study has shown what has come to be known as an "empathy gap" in people. In its simplest form, this means that when we are happy we have trouble identifying with someone who is sad, or when we're angry we have difficulty understanding why someone is content.
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Culture Influences Judgment of Others
LiveScience: European Americans are more likely than Asian-Americans to judge an individual's personality based on behaviors, such as presuming someone who, say, won't touch a door handle is neurotic, a new study suggests. The key is cultural, according to the researchers. European American culture emphasizes individual independence; meanwhile, Asian culture is more interdependent and more sensitive to social contexts. This difference means European Americans are inclined to account for someone's behavior by making assumptions about their personality, while Asians are not (at least not without some context), according to the researchers.
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How People Lose 100 Pounds
I am in awe of people who make a decision to lose a huge amount of weight—75 pounds, 100, even more—and then do it. I’m not talking about The Biggest Loser contestants, who do it for money and fame. I mean those who, privately and without fanfare, commit themselves to diet and exercise, set a distant goal, and then slowly chip away—one difficult pound after another difficult pound after another. The payoff is so far away. How do they stay motivated for the long haul? How do they even get started? Classical theories of motivation fail to explain such long-range commitment.
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Are Your Values Right or Left? The Answer Is More Literal Than You Think
Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.” But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes?
