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What Your Tweets Say About You
The New Yorker: How much can your tweets reveal about you? Judging by the last nine hundred and seventy-two words that I used on Twitter, I’m about average when it comes to feeling upbeat and being personable, and I’m less likely than most people to be depressed or angry. That, at least, is the snapshot provided by AnalyzeWords, one of the latest creations from James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas who studies how language relates to well-being and personality.
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Stop mocking Starbucks’s ‘Race Together.’ It could actually lead to useful conversations about race.
The Washington Post: Starbucks recently launched a campaign called “Race Together,” in which baristas invite customers to engage in conversations about race by writing “race together” on their coffee cups. The idea has been mockedand critiqued as naive, insensitive and perhaps even abusive to its baristas. Don’t be so quick to dismiss it. I’ve been teaching and conducting research on the complex and, often complicated, dynamics of race-related dialogues and interracial interactions for more than 20 years. Encouraging people to talk about race and racism more often can actually improve our willingness and ability to do so.
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Seeing Red on the Road: Can Car Color Impact Driver Behavior?
It’s a common belief that driving a red car leads to more speeding tickets and higher car insurance rates. However, research from a 2007 study by Monash University in Australia found that red cars are actually slightly less likely to be involved in accidents compared to other colors (black cars were actually most accident prone). The insurance industry also denies that car color comes into play when setting car insurance rates, though they do look at the vehicle make and model. New research from an international team of psychological scientists puts the brakes on another common stereotype about red cars: they elicit more aggressive driving.
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Weight Bias Impacts Our Perceptions of Competence
Overweight individuals often face discrimination across many stages of their careers. Compared to their thinner colleagues, people who are overweight are less likely to be hired, less likely to be promoted, and ultimately earn lower wages. A new study suggests this weight-based bias may even extend to judgments of competence. Psychological scientists Emma Levine and Maurice Schweitzer of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that people gave overweight individuals low ratings for competence, regardless of their qualifications or performance.
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Too much “alone time” may shorten your life
CBS News: More Americans than ever before are living alone. Some people are better at this than others; they thrive on "alone time," and seem perfectly happy flying solo at the movies, restaurants and on vacation when the rest of the world couldn't imagine doing these things without a partner, spouse or friends. But new research finds that even if you relish solitary living, too much "me time"could cut your life short. A study conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University finds both loneliness and social isolation could shorten a person's life span, comparable to the effects of obesity.
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Older Really Can Mean Wiser
The New York Times: Behind all those canned compliments for older adults — spry! wily! wise! — is an appreciation for something that scientists have had a hard time characterizing: mental faculties that improve with age. Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence. Still, young adults who consult their elders (mostly when desperate) don’t do so just to gather facts, solve crosswords or borrow a credit card.
