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You Are Built to Be Kind
New York Magazine: Let's take a few minutes this dreary winter Wednesday to remind ourselves that people aren't always the worst. In a neat little animated video published yesterday by the University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner explains that we were essentially built to be nice. Keltner explains his own work using brain imaging technology, in which he's shown images of human suffering to people in the lab. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Why Tom Brady’s F-Bombs Are A-OK
Boston.com: Nope, when it came to Brady and his F-Bombs, we pulled an anti-Rolling Stone and decided to do some reporting. In 2012, the Association for Psychological Science published a piece called "The Science of Swearing" in which its authors studied more than 10,000 episodes of public swearing by adults and children. "Swearing can occur with any emotion and yield positive or negative outcomes. Our work so far suggests that most uses of swear words are not problematic . . . and rarely have we witnessed negative consequences," authors Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz wrote. Read the whole story: Boston.com
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Hugs help protect against the common cold, research finds
PBS: Flu season is upon us, and doctors are predicting that this year’s epidemic could be especially severe. What steps are you taking to protect yourself from disease this winter? Stocking up on hand sanitizer? Chugging orange juice? Avoiding handshakes and crowded subway cars? How about hugging your friends? Wait, what? A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that frequent hugging helps reduce individuals’ susceptibility to infections associated with stress, and reduces the severity of symptoms if an infection is contracted by providing increased social support.
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Chatting About Time Management With The Godfather Of Irrationality, Dan Ariely
Forbes: If you’ve spent any time in the psychology and self improvement sections of any bookstore, you know that Dan Ariely quite literally wrote the book on human irrationality. With bestsellers likePredictably Irrational and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely is a go-to source for knowledge about why we do what we do, even when doing it just doesn’t make much sense. Now Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics atDuke University, has turned his attention to another topic that vexes the best of us: time management.
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The power of believing that you can improve
TED: Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain's capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field. Watch the video: TED
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Baby Brains
National Geographic: In the late 1980s, when the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging America’s cities, Hallam Hurt, a neonatologist in Philadelphia, worried about the damage being done to children born to addicted mothers. She and her colleagues, studying children from low-income families, compared four-year-olds who’d been exposed to the drug with those who hadn’t. They couldn’t find any significant differences. Instead, what they discovered was that in both groups the children’s IQs were much lower than average. “These little children were coming in cute as buttons, and yet their IQs were like 82 and 83,” Hurt says. “Average IQ is 100.
