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Study of the Day: Why There’s No Love Lost Between Political Enemies
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: Usually, visceral states, or internal conditions that we want badly to change, can get so overwhelming that we project them onto others. A person who's freezing, for instance, would likely assume that the people around him must be cold as well. But how far does this effect extend? METHODOLOGY: To see if political rivals can also feel each other's pain, researchers led by Ed O'Brien asked subjects to read a short story about a person who was either a left-wing, pro-gay rights Democrat or a Republican proponent of traditional marriage. This character goes hiking in winter and gets lost with no food, water, or extra clothes.
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Walk in park boosts memory
Indo Asian News Service: A walk in the park benefits people suffering from depression, say researchers on the basis of new evidence. Marc Berman, post-doctoral fellow at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute, working with Michigan and Stanford Universities, said: "Our study showed that participants with clinical depression demonstrated improved memory performance after a walk in nature, compared to a walk in a busy urban environment." Berman, however, cautioned that such walks are not a replacement for existing and well-validated treatments for clinical depression, such as psychotherapy and drug treatment, the Journal of Affective Disorders reports.
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Soup has many benefits, but it can be a problem if it has too much salt
The Washington Post: Sipping a bowl of soup is an easy way to give yourself a healthful boost — as long as you keep an eye on the nutrition label. Nearly 99 percent of us consume more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, the upper limit recommended for African Americans, people older than 50 and those with high blood pressure or chronic kidney disease, according to a recent analysis from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. (The 1,500 figure covers about half of the U.S. population; the limit for most other people is 2,300 milligrams.) And much of the sodium in our diet is in prepared foods such as soup.
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Sophia and Jacob are most popular U.S. baby names
USA Today: The most popular baby names often change a bit year to year, but not Jacob, which in 2011 marked its 13th year as the most popular name for boys, according the Social Security Administration's tally for 2011, out Monday. Sophia is the new No. 1 name for girls, moving the most popular girls' name for the past two years — Isabella — to second-best. Mason was No. 2 on the boys' list. The federal agency notes that although Mason has been a relatively popular name since the 1990s, it had never reached the top 25 names until 2010. That's when it hit No. 12, suggesting the rise may be due to reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian's son, Mason.
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People See Sexy Pictures of Women as Objects, Not People
Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women’s sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people. Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. “What’s unclear is, we don’t actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects,” says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
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Religion Replenishes Self-Control
There are many theories about why religion exists, most of them unproven. Now, in an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Kevin Rounding of Queen’s University, Ontario, offers a new idea, and some preliminary evidence to back it up. The primary purpose of religious belief is to enhance the basic cognitive process of self-control, says Rounding, which in turn promotes any number of valuable social behaviors. He ran four experiments in which he primed volunteers to think about religious matters. Those volunteers showed more discipline than controls, and more ability to delay gratification.
