A Quick And Easy Way To Make Yourself Tougher
and up straight. Via Eurekalert: ...poor posture not only makes a bad impression, but can actually make you physically weaker. According to a study by Scott Wiltermuth, assistant professor of management organization at the USC Marshall School of Business, and Vanessa K. Bohns, postdoctoral fellow at the J.L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, adopting dominant versus submissive postures actually decreases your sensitivity to pain. And: ...their research suggests that curling up into a ball may make…
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What makes us selfish: happiness or sadness?
oks like happy people are thinking about themselves. If you break the law, pray for a sad judge: Does temporary mood influence how fair or selfish we are in interpersonal situations? These three experiments predicted and found that when people have the power to allocate scarce resources between themselves and others in the dictator game, positive mood increased selfishness, and sad mood produced greater fairness. In a public setting (Experiment 1), happy persons kept more raffle tickets to themselves when…
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Are your credit cards killing you?
bt hurts your health: We analyze the effect of household indebtedness on different health outcomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1999-2009. To establish a causal effect, we rely on (a) fixed-effects methods, (b) a subsample of constantly employed individuals, and (c) lagged debt variables to rule out problems of reverse causality. We apply different measures of household indebtedness, such as the percentage shares of household income spent on consumer credit and home loan repayments (which indicate the severity of household indebtedness)…
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Should everyone be required to learn a musical instrument?
m sure it sounds strange: a fascist rule that makes people learn to create music. I'm not a hippie, nor am I Amy Chua. I've got evidence: A simple cost-benefit framework is used to estimate substantive social benefits associated with a universal music training program in Venezuela (B/C ratio of 1.68). Those social benefits accrue from both reduced school drop-out and declining community victimization. This evidence of important social benefits adds to the abundant evidence of individual gains reported by the developmental psychology…
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Is there an easy way to help you follow through on your goals?
eep on it: Remembering to execute deferred goals (prospective memory) is a ubiquitous memory challenge, and one that is often not successfully accomplished. Could sleeping after goal encoding promote later execution? We evaluated this possibility by instructing participants to execute a prospective memory goal after a short delay (20 min), a 12-hr wake delay, or a 12-hr sleep delay. Goal execution declined after the 12-hr wake delay relative to the short delay. In contrast, goal execution was relatively preserved after…
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Gardening Reduces Stress
ress-relieving effects of gardening were hypothesized and tested in a field experiment. Thirty allotment gardeners performed a stressful Stroop task and were then randomly assigned to 30 minutes of outdoor gardening or indoor reading on their own allotment plot. Salivary cortisol levels and self-reported mood were repeatedly measured. Gardening and reading each led to decreases in cortisol during the recovery period, but decreases were significantly stronger in the gardening group. Positive mood was fully restored after gardening, but further deteriorated…
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Is ass-kissing good for your health?
is new research shows that when politically savvy professionals use the coping skill of ingratiation, they may neutralize ostracism and other psychological distress that other less savvy individuals have to cope with in the workplace. Ostracized employees experience more job tension, emotional exhaustion and depressed mood at work. Savvy career minded individuals have known for some time that ingratiating oneself to the boss and others -- perhaps more commonly known as 'sucking up'- can help move them up the corporate…
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Is there an easy way to increase your pain tolerance?
cent research (Carney, Cuddy & Yap, 2010) has shown that adopting a powerful pose changes people's hormonal levels and increases their propensity to take risks in the same ways that possessing actual power does. In the current research, we explore whether adopting physical postures associated with power, or simply interacting with others who adopt these postures, can similarly influence sensitivity to pain. We conducted two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants who adopted dominant poses displayed higher pain thresholds than those who adopted…
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