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Why Being Able To Compartmentalize Is A Key Ingredient For Risk-Taking
Forbes: It’s a crazy morning at home, and your spouse is furious at you. Harried, you slam the car door shut and race off to work where an important task awaits. Your ability to tune out the situation at home and focus on the job at hand is facilitated by your emotional understanding. It’s a form of emotional intelligence, according to Jeremy Yip, a lecturer and research scholar at Wharton. Compartmentalizing enables a person to identify what is stressing them out and to allow other, unrelated factors in their life to stand on their own merits, Yip says.
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In These Gyms, Nobody Cares How You Look In Yoga Pants
NPR: If you want to lift weights or use the treadmill at Downsize Fitness, you have to be at least 50 pounds overweight. Kendall Schrantz is a fan – and a member. The 24-year-old has struggled with her weight since she was in the second grade. The looks she got at other gyms made her uncomfortable. But now she drives more than an hour to Downsize Fitness in Fort Worth three times a week, just to exercise. "It's worth every single penny I paid for gas," she said. "It's worth the time I spend on the road, the miles." ...
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Labeling Obesity as a Disease May Have Psychological Costs
Messages that describe obesity as a disease may undermine healthy behaviors and beliefs among obese individuals, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings show that obese individuals exposed to such messages placed less importance on health-focused dieting and reported less concern about weight. These beliefs, in turn, predicted unhealthier food choices.
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Are Death Row Inmates Innocent If They Refuse a Last Meal?
Pacific Standard: In May 2007, Philip Workman, soon to be executed by the state of Tennessee for murdering a police officer, was asked what he wanted for his final meal. Workman, who claimed he had not committed the murder, refused to eat anything. Deliver a pizza to a homeless person instead, he said. What if death row inmates’ acceptance or refusal of a last meal reveals their actual guilt or innocence in the crime they’ve been accused of committing? That’s a correlation Kevin M. Kniffin, a research associate at Cornell University’s Lab for Experimental Economics and Decision Research, has begun to explore in a study recently published in Law.
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Gossip and Ostracism May Have Hidden Group Benefits
Conventional wisdom holds that gossip and social exclusion are always malicious, undermining trust and morale in groups. But sharing this kind of "reputational information" could have benefits for society, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Robb Willer, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University, explored the nature of gossip and ostracism in collaboration with co-authors Matthew Feinberg, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and Michael Schultz from the University of California–Berkeley.
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Charitable acts may backfire, researchers report
Medhill: If someone volunteers at a charity hoping to reel in a love interest, is that act still viewed as altruistic? Not likely, according to a study published in the January edition of Psychological Science. Yale University researchers found that people tend to view personal and corporate charitable acts performed for personal gain as less moral than other types of self-interested behavior.