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The Power of Red
Allure Magazine: Red is not a color you wear when you're feeling shy. You swipe on red lipstick or put on a red dress when you want to be noticed. It's sexy but assertive, not demure. After all, it's also the color of stop signs, of anger, of extreme heat. But where does red get its power? A few new studies aimed to answer that question. The first, published in the upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, asks whether our ideas about the color red are cultural or if they have deeper, biological roots. The authors think it might be a product of evolution, not just convention.
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IMHO
The New York Times: Humility has a bad reputation. The definition for humility and humbleness in my Random House dictionary includes: “having feelings of insignificance, inferiority, subservience…low in rank, importance, status, quality etc.” But recently I sat in on a panel at the Association for Psychological Science convention where the scholars had a much more appreciative view. June Tangney of George Mason University emphasized that humility is not equivalent to low self-esteem. Rather, the humble person has an accurate view of herself. She can acknowledge her mistakes. She has low self-focus.
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New report suggests coffee should be sold with a warning
BBC News: A new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that coffee should come with a health warning. Professor Simon Crowe led the team that looked into the effects of coffee for La Trobe University in Victoria. He tells Radio 5 live Up All Night's Rhod Sharp that if you have got a high-stress lifestyle and a heavy caffeine habit you could be getting more than you bargained for; you could start hearing voices. Listen: BBC News
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Baltimore scientists search for cause, treatment for hoarding
Los Angeles Times: The table in Jack Samuels' Fells Point office is piled two feet high with books, papers, scientific journals and grant applications. Samuels' wife likes to tease him that he has a hoarding problem, just like the people he studies. In reality, those stacks of paper might hold a remedy. Samuels, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine, is the go-to guy nationwide for researchers seeking to understand the biological basis of hoarding — an intense, irrational drive to collect items in vast quantities, coupled with an inability to discard even objects that are worthless or broken. Read more: Los Angeles Times
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This Is Your Brain. And this Is Your Brain on Gossip.
Boston Magazine: Late last month, smack in the middle of the DiMasi trial and right around the time we learned of Arnold's infidelity, a Science study out of Northeastern University popped into the world and promptly landed itself in headlines across the blogosphere. The title, "The Visual Impact of Gossip,” pretty much explains its popularity off the bat.
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Study: Key To Better Sex Revealed
CBS News: WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Women's fake screams of ecstasy in bed may have less to do with trying to protect the sensitive egos of their partners, and more to do with a gal's own personal insecurities and fear of intimacy, new research suggests. Approximately 60 percent of women have faked an orgasm during intercourse or oral sex, according to Erin Cooper of Temple University, who has been studying these women to figure out why. "This is something that we talk about happening in popular culture, in the movies and magazines," Cooper told LiveScience. "We know that this is pretty prevalent in our culture, but we don't know much about it from a scientific standpoint.