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Can Angry Tweets Predict Heart-Disease Rates?
New York Magazine: Never before in human history have so many people expressed their emotions so publicly. Every day, countless gigabytes of happiness and sadness and frustration and every other conceivable feeling are dumped onto the web, whether in the form of ecstatic Facebook statuses or paranoid blog posts. Gifted with a mother lode of new psychological data, researchers are eagerly lapping up as much of it as possible in an attempt to better understand homo sapiens. Naturally, Twitter is a major nexus for this sort of research.
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Can hugs make you healthier?
Salon: It’s February. Are you sick? If you are, don’t fret. The Centers for Disease Control tells us that cold and flu season peaks in January and February, so statistically speaking, your sniffles are nothing special. And, believe me, I feel for you. I have a 4-year-old daughter who is the most thoroughgoing germ collector known to humankind. Every day she trots home from her language immersion preschool, an international clearinghouse for viruses. I’ve lost count of how many times she has walked in coughing and sniffling, a little pouty and with her arms outstretched, looking for a consolatory hug.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Targeted Rejection Predicts Decreased Anti-Inflammatory Gene Expression and Increased Symptom Severity in Youth With Asthma Michael L. M. Murphy, George M. Slavich, Edith Chen, and Gregory E. Miller Targeted rejection -- the intentional rejection of a person by an individual or group -- seems to be a uniquely damaging form of interpersonal stress. Participants between the ages of 9 and 18 with diagnosed asthma were assessed every 6 months for 2 years. At each assessment, participants underwent a blood draw and a stress interview and reported their daily asthma symptoms for 2 weeks following each visit.
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We’re all susceptible to false memories
USA Today: It seems hard to believe that NBC News anchor Brian Williams would remember riding in a helicopter that was shot down if he was nowhere near it, but there are reasons that it's plausible. Ask Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who pioneered the study of false memory — what happens when people remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently than how they happened. She has conducted hundreds of experiments on more than 30,000 people over the past 40 years. She has found that a person's memory is highly susceptible to suggestions or insinuations from conversations with other people or from watching, reading or listening to news stories.
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The science behind Brian Williams’s mortifying memory flub
The Washington Post: When we tell stories about our lives, most of us never have our memories questioned. NBC's Brian Williams, like other high-profile people in the past, is finding out what happens when questions arise. Williams's faux pas – retelling a story of his helicopter coming under fire in Iraq a dozen years ago when it was actually the helicopter flying ahead of him – was much like Hillary Rodham Clinton's during the 2008 presidential campaign. Her story was about coming under fire during a visit to an airfield in Bosnia 12 years earlier. George W.
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How Do We Increase Empathy?
The New York Times: In my last column, I wrote about a high school buddy, Kevin Green, a warm and helpful man who floundered in a tough job market, hurt his back and died at the age of 54. The column was a call for empathy for those who are struggling, but, predictably, scolds complained that Kevin’s problems were of his own making. Grrrr. So what do we know about empathy and how to nurture it? First, it seems hard-wired. Even laboratory rats will sometimes free a trapped companion before munching on a food treat.
