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Language also shapes our attitudes
Sify: The language we speak may shape not only our thoughts, but also our attitudes. Harvard University psychologists found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were influenced by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections. Implicit attitudes, positive or negative associations, which people may be unaware they possess, have been shown to predict behaviour towards members of social groups, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology reports. Read the whole story: Sify
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Your View of Personal Goals Can Affect Your Relationships
How you think about your goals—whether it's to improve yourself or to do better than others—can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People with "mastery goals" want to improve themselves. Maybe they want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe loop. On the other hand, people with what psychologists call "performance goals" are trying to outperform others—to get a better grade than a friend or be Employee of the Year.
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Young in mind: Saying no to caricatures of aging
I recently became a grandfather. This was a joyous event in our family, and my first emotion was indeed joy -- for the new parents, for the healthy baby boy. But I confess that my second reaction -- and not far behind -- was much more conflicted: I'm too young to be a grandfather, I found myself thinking. Don't grandparents sit on park benches and drive slowly? Within weeks I found myself upping my cardio routine and modifying my diet a bit, with the idea of shedding a couple of pounds. I should do more sit-ups, too. Who knows, maybe I'll even train for a triathlon. There are two schools of thought regarding aging.
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You’ve changed somehow. Is that a new turnip?
I spent about an hour yesterday at the National Gallery of Art, mesmerized by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings of human faces. They are not realistic depictions of faces, though some were meant as portraits of public figures. They are instead composites of familiar objects like flowers, fruit or fish and crustaceans—each rendered with scientific accuracy. Close examination reveals the intricate interplay of these objects, but at first glance they are unmistakably faces, with noses and ears and hair and chins. They are quite surreal, which is remarkable given that Arcimboldo created them in the 16th century. Arcimboldo clearly knew something about how we perceive faces.
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Sleep Makes Your Memories Stronger
As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Sleep is making memories stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who cowrote the review with Elizabeth A.
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Taste the difference: How our genes, gender and even hormones affect the way we eat
The Independent: Try it, it's delicious!" I often urge my children, bossily. And although I don't say it out loud, I feel equally baffled when adults are really faddy eaters or don't share my adoration of a particularly tasty morsel. It turns out I'm not a food fascist but contrary to popular belief, there is no one version of delicious. Some of us have a far stronger sense of taste than others (not necessarily a good thing) and a host of factors ranging from mood to gender to our sense of hearing (really) can impact heavily on our perception of flavour. Psychologist Linda Bartoshuk and her colleagues first coined the term "supertaster" in the 1990s.
