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How Knowing a Foreign Language Can Improve Your Decisions
Scientific American: Researchers have sought to understand the range and limits of these emotional language effects. Lower proficiency and/or late acquisition of the foreign language seems to be a crucial constraint. For people who grew up bilingual, skin conductance responses and self-reports were similar when listening to emotional phrases in either language. One method for finding new types of emotional-language effects is to examine areas where cognitive neuroscience reports that people can switch between analytical processing and emotional processing. Gut, automatic or instinctive reasoning is grounded in an emotional good-bad response.
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Just staring into space? Perhaps not – daydreaming helps children concentrate, and makes them perform better in tests
Daily Mail: Daydreaming could help children oncentrate - and even perform better in tests, researchers claim. The children also feel less anxious and more motivated to perform, according to a review of studies on the value of time to reflect. Education should focus more on giving children time to think, claim researchers at the University of Southern California. A study found that introspection - time to reflect - may be harder and harder to come by but can also be an increasingly valuable part of life. Researchers from the University of Southern California studied literature from neuroscience and psychological science to explore what it meant to our brains to be 'at rest'.
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Time flows uphill for remote Papua New Guinea tribe
New Scientist: "HERE and now", "Back in the 1950s", "Going forward"... Western languages are full of spatial metaphors for time, and whether you are, say, British, French or German, you no doubt think of the past as behind you and the future as stretching out ahead. Time is a straight line that runs through your body. Once thought to be universal, this "embodied cognition of time" is in fact strictly cultural. Over the past decade, encounters with various remote tribal societies have revealed a rich diversity of the ways in which humans relate to time (see "Attitudes across the latitudes"). The latest, coming from the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea, is perhaps the most remarkable.
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Making Yourself Miserable Reading the News?
Huffington Post: Does watching cable news, reading the newspaper or browsing websites (including this one) make you personally miserable? Chances are high that you're making one critical mistake and likely adding to our societal woes in the process. The good news is that it's fairly easy to fix this common mistake and in this process quickly boost your own inner joy. It's simple: be less partisan, less biased and less antagonistic toward your fellow human beings. ... As I wrote about extensively in The Bliss Experiment, our choices and outlook, whether positive or negative, greatly shape both our inward mental state and even our outward environment.
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For 49 years, Herb Pick was a scientist and mentor at U
Star Tribune: For nearly half a century, graduate students arriving at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development often were greeted by an unassuming man who helped carry in their boxes. As they settled in, the new students soon discovered that the nice old guy they mistook for a janitor was, in fact, the famous Prof. Herbert L. Pick Jr. Or "Herb," as he preferred to be called. "He was one of the best scientists and also one of the most humble guys you'd ever meet," said Megan Gunnar, director of the institute. "He packaged those two things together. He also was a fabulous teacher and mentor." Pick, of St.
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Which Makes You Happier: Money or Respect?
Shape Magazine: They say money can't buy happiness, and "they" would be right. According to a new study, a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T goes a lot further than a paycheck when it comes to being happy for the long haul. Published recently in the journal Psychological Science, researchers did a total of four studies examining the reasons why higher socioeconomic status such as higher income, wealth or education does not boost subjective wellbeing. The first smaller study surveyed college students' sociometric status (how much they were respected and admired by those around you) and socioeconomic status, and predicted students' social well-being scores.
