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Sarcasm Spurs Creative Thinking
Scientific American Mind: “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” that connoisseur of witticisms, Oscar Wilde, is said to have remarked. But not everyone shares his view. Communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away from this particular form of expression. The reason is simple: sarcasm carries the poisonous sting of contempt, which can hurt others and harm relationships. By its very nature, it invites conflict. ... And yet behavioral scientists Li Huang of INSEAD business school, Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia University and I have found that sarcasm may also offer an unexpected psychological payoff: greater creativity.
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Loneliness can literally hurt your heart, scientists say
The Washington Post: That pang in the middle of your chest when you feel lonely may not just be in your head. Researchers reported in the journal Heart this week that poor social relationships could actually hurt your heart. The study involved what is known as a meta-analysis of 23 previous studies involving 181,000 people. This involves taking the raw data, pooling it and reanalyzing it. In total, the studies included 4,628 cases of cardiovascular disease and 3,002 stroke cases. The researchers found that being lonely or socially isolated appeared to be associated with a 29 percent increase in risk of heart disease and with a 32 percent increase in risk of stroke. ...
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Who was a real US president, Alexander Hamilton or Chester Arthur? Most Americans get the answer wrong.
Discover: Americans aren’t exactly known for our knowledge of history (or geography, for that matter). But we should at least know our own presidents, right? Enter these researchers, who used an online survey to measure how well people can distinguish real US presidents from others with well-known or presidential-sounding names. They found that, while people were actually able to recognize 88% of US presidents by name (the exceptions including lesser known presidents like Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur), they were also likely to incorrectly identify several non-presidents, including Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.
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What Scientists Know—And Don’t Know—About Sexual Orientation
A comprehensive review of sexual orientation research aims to correct important misconceptions about the link between scientific findings and political agendas.
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Merging Career And Motherhood, In Simultaneous Practice
NPR: A few years ago, I received an early career award at the annual meeting of a professional society. Before the awards ceremony, the other recipients and I were herded together, placed in adjacent seats, and told to wait for the event to begin. The five or six of us had a lot in common. Though we worked in different areas of psychology, we were at similar career stages and had overlapping interests. But we didn't spend our time together talking about science or ideas — the work that had won us the awards we were there to receive. What we talked about was childcare. Read the whole story: NPR
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Limits of Executive Control: Sequential Effects in Predictable Environments Frederick Verbruggen, Amy McAndrew, Gabrielle Weidemann, Tobias Stevens, and Ian P. L. McLaren Studies have shown that bottom-up processes modulate performance in unpredictable environments, but is this also true in predictable environments? Participants completed a go/no-go task in which the trials alternated predictably. Before seeing each stimulus, participants had to rate the extent to which they thought the go or no-go stimulus would appear.
