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When Is Speech Violence?
The New York Times: Imagine that a bully threatens to punch you in the face. A week later, he walks up to you and breaks your nose with his fist. Which is more harmful: the punch or the threat? The answer might seem obvious: Physical violence is physically damaging; verbal statements aren’t. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Some scientists hate NIH’s new definition of a clinical trial. Here’s why
Science: Nancy Kanwisher, a cognitive neuroscientist, has spent her career pinning down how the human brain responds to visual inputs such as faces. As part of that work, Kanwisher asks volunteers—usually college students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where she works—to lie in an MRI machine that records their brain activity while they do a task, such as viewing a photo. Although such studies reveal information that can be relevant to diseases such as autism, they do not test treatments. But a few weeks ago, Kanwisher and colleagues in related behavioral research fields—from cognitive psychology to vision science—were dismayed to learn that the U.S.
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Promising Behavioral Intervention Helps Cut Idling Car Engines
A recent behavioral intervention in the UK convinced up to 50% of drivers to switch off their idling engines, drastically reducing pollution and noise.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Role of PTSD, Depression, and Alcohol Misuse Symptom Severity in Linking Deployment Stressor Exposure and Post-Military Work and Family Outcomes in Male and Female Veterans Brian N. Smith, Emily C. Taverna, Annie B. Fox, Paula P. Schnurr, Rebecca A. Matteo, and Dawne Vogt The authors examined the relationship among deployment stressors, post-military work, and family quality of life in male and female veterans who had returned from military deployment in Afghanistan or Iraq within the preceding 2 years.
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A Study Encourages You to Have Fun First and Finish Your Work Later
New York Magazine: It seems like the natural order of things: first work, then fun. If you finish your dinner, you can have dessert; if you finish your homework, you can play your video games. It’s what parents teach children, and it’s how adults typically run their own lives, too — you have to get your work done sometime, after all, and, anyway, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy your chosen leisure activity if some unfinished project was still hanging over your head. And yet the results of a recent set of experiments suggest that although people expect that they will enjoy goofing off more if they’ve finished their work first, that’s not exactly true.
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Why Government ‘Nudges’ Motivate Good Citizen Behavior
Working Knowledge: Most governments aren’t subtle when they want citizens to do something. The United States spends close to $1 billion annually on advertising--trying to convince citizens to do everything from taking flu prevention shots to reporting unattended suitcases at the airport. But now agencies are finding that subtle “nudges” can motivate behavior much better than ads, fines, or deadlines. Nudges, or small changes to the context in which decisions are made, are the subject of a new analysis by Harvard Business School Associate Professor John Beshears and colleagues, recently published in the journal Psychological Science.
