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How People Learn to Become Resilient
The New Yorker: Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any.
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In Real-Estate, ‘Love’ Hurts and ‘Sexy’ Sells
The Wall Street Journal: In luxury real estate, love is cheap and sex sells. An analysis of roughly 1.6 million home listings found that lower-priced homes were most likely to have the word “love” in property descriptions, while homes priced in the millions of dollars were most likely to have “sexy” and “seductive” in the descriptions. “Love is basic,” said Javier Vivas, an economic researcher for Realtor.com, which analyzed the data. “It’s a pre-canned pitch to generically describe something beautiful.” ...
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Five myths about love
The Washington Post: Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is...detectable on an fMRI scan? Poets have written about love for millennia, but only recently has it become a subject of serious scientific pursuit. Psychologists, biologists, economists and anthropologists are all investigating the role of love in our lives and our culture. The poets, it turns out, have gotten a lot right (for example, the metaphor of love as a kind of madness gained credence when one study found a chemical resemblance between romantic love and obsessive-compulsive disorder ). But we still have a lot to learn. Maybe love will always be part myth, but it’s worth debunking a few of our more outdated ideas. ...
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Who’s right? Who’s left?
The Boston Globe: THE LEFT-VERSUS-RIGHT labeling in our political discourse is so ingrained in our minds that our sense of political differences can be undermined by switching sides — literally. In October 2012, researchers asked people to rapidly identify whether a picture was of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. One set of participants categorized the pictures by using the left hand to press the “Q” key for Obama and the right hand to press the “P” key for Romney; another set of participants categorized the pictures by using the left hand to press the “Q” key for Romney and the right hand to press the “P” key for Obama. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Driving May Help Prevent Cognitive Decline
Driving a car is one of the most cognitively complex tasks we engage in on a daily basis. Driving requires an assortment of cognitive skills including executive functioning, information processing, visual processing, and memory. As
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A Cluttered Kitchen Can Nudge Us To Overeat, Study Finds
NPR: Hunger is not the only reason we eat sweets. Often we eat as a way to celebrate, or sometimes we reach for food when we're sad or bored. And a study published this month in the journal Environment and Behavior points to another factor that can nudge us to eat: clutter. "The notion that places — such as cluttered offices or disorganized homes — can be modified to help us control our food intake is becoming an important solution in helping us become more slim by design," report Brian Wansink of Cornell University and his colleagues in their write-up of the study. ... So, how might these findings translate to a messy desk? After all, many of us do a lot of snacking at the office.
