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New Research about Eating, Sleeping, Eliminating and Snuggling
As Cleveland Cavaliers guard J. R. Smith has probably heard a few times at this point, you have to be solid in the fundamentals. For a basketball player, some of the fundamentals are dribbling, shooting and, as Smith learned the hard way, knowing the correct score with seconds to play in the first game of the NBA Finals. For the rest of us (who blissfully do dumb things without attracting worldwide attention), the major fundamentals include sleeping, eating, sex and eliminating. Fortunately, new scientific research has made key discoveries all these areas.
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You Should Actually Send That Thank You Note You’ve Been Meaning to Write
We want to let you know that we are grateful that you are taking the time to click on this headline. Because without you reading the story, what’s the point? We are now going to use your precious time to share a surprising new finding: People like getting thank you notes. --- The study, published last month in the journal Psychological Science, is an effort to fill a hole in the growing field of gratitude research. Numerous studies had documented a range of benefits to individuals who express gratitude, so then the question researchers turned to was — what’s holding people back?
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An Enormous Study of the Genes Related to Staying in School
When scientists publish their research, it’s rare for them to write an accompanying FAQ that explains what they found and what it means. It’s especially rare for that FAQ to be three times longer than the research paper itself. But Daniel Benjamin and his colleagues felt the need to do so, because they work on a topic that is frequently and easily misunderstood: the genetics of education. Over the past five years, Benjamin has been part of an international team of researchers identifying variations in the human genome that are associated with how many years of education people get. In 2013, after analyzing the DNA of 101,000 people, the team found just three of these genetic variants.
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Biracial People Play a Uniquely Positive Role Helping Americans Grapple With Race
White Americans are very good at avoiding the subject of race. "I don't see color—I treat everyone equally" is a common way to dismiss complaints about white privilege and systematic bias. New research reveals a large and growing group of fellow citizens are uniquely placed to break through this barrier to meaningful discussion: biracial individuals. It finds American whites are more likely to acknowledge race as significant if they have been exposed to people from mixed-race backgrounds. "The multiracial population's increasing size and visibility has the potential to positively shift racial attitudes," writes a research team led by Duke University psychologist Sarah E. Gaither.
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A New Study Busts All Your Excuses for Not Saying Thank You More
If you know anything at all about the science of happiness, you know that gratitude is great for our wellbeing. It rewires your brain for positivity, boosts your energy levels, and if your thankfulness is directed at someone else, makes the receiving party feel great. All of this is both research-backed and totally common sense, so why don't we actually get out there and express more gratitude? One answer is bad habits. It's all too easy to forget to count our blessings (being around negative people doesn't help), but a new study recently published in Psychological Science suggests that inertia is only part of the story.
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How Psychology Explains Partisanship
Why are Americans so politically polarized? For June’s Masthead book club, members chose a read that addresses the question from a psychological perspective: the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. (Haidt, by happy coincidence, is also a Masthead member.) He argues that political divides are abetted by the fundamentally intuitive, instead of rational, nature of our minds. Using the metaphor of a mind divided into an elephant and a rider, or its intuitive and conscious parts, he demonstrates how much the intuitive part controls our thinking.
