5 ways to make your naps blissful and awesome:
a Boston Globe: If you're a morning person, the best time to nap is around 1 or 1:30PM. If you're a night owl, nap later, around 2:30 or 3PM. The best naps are under 45 mins or 90-120 mins. Anything in between is likely to give you that groggy feeling. Naps don't mean you're lazy: A NASA study showed that in-flight naps improved subsequent performance by 34% and overall alertness by 54%. To make sure you're productive after your nap…
1 min read
Are drunk people responsible for their behavior?
ey know what they're doing -- alcohol just makes them care less about the consequences. Via Healthzone: A new study says that people who commit blunders while under the influence of alcohol know they’re doing it; they just don’t care. This means buzzed or drunken people who engage in embarrassing or harmful behaviour can’t blame it on not having control, said researcher Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. While this isn’t the first study that…
1 min read
10 ways to improve your memory:
a The Psychologist: Activate all your relevant past knowledge Organise new information: seek a meaningful structure Actively elaborate Learn the phonetic system for translating numbers into memorable words Form mental images linking the things to be remembered Create links to cue information through pegwords and familiar images Practise remembering after several suitable intervals Play the name game Explain what you are studying to someone else or yourself When struggling, try to reconstruct the context Join over 180,000 readers. Get a free…
1 min read
Why can we predict other people’s behavior more accurately than our own?
en predicting other people's behavior we always consider the context. With our own behavior we like to believe that we won't be affected by context. Via BPS Research Digest: Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the…
1 min read
How can you stop worrying about that stuff you still need to finish?
st making a plan of how you will complete it later can reduce anxiety and intrusive thoughts: Unfulfilled goals persist in the mind, as asserted by ample theory and evidence (e.g., the Zeigarnik effect). The standard assumption has been that such cognitive activation persists until the goal is fulfilled. However, we predicted that contributing to goal pursuit through plan making could satisfy the various cognitive processes that usually promote goal pursuit. In several studies, we activated unfulfilled goals and demonstrated…
2 minutes
If talking to yourself improves performance, what should you be saying?
at you need to know: Talking to yourself does help performance. Self-talk is best used in trying to learn new skills than covering things you are already familiar with. In terms of physical activity, it helps more with fine, subtle tasks than big movements. Via Eurekalert: But the researchers teased out more - different self-talk cues work differently in different situations. For tasks requiring fine skills or for improving technique "instructional self-talk", such as a technical instruction ("elbow-up" which Hatzigeorgiadis…
2 minutes
Does “full disclosure” really address conflicts of interest?
tually, it may make things even worse. Via Boston.com: Disclosure doesn’t solve problems the way we think it does, and in fact it can actually backfire. Coming clean about conflicts of interest, they find, can promote less ethical behavior by advisers. And though most of us assume we’d cast a skeptical eye on advice from a doctor, stockbroker, or politician with a personal stake in our decision, disclosure about conflicts may actually lead us to make worse choices. “None of…
2 minutes
Women Who Like Politics Have More Orgasms
e political and religious correlates of sexual behavior in a sample of 344 German university students are presented and discussed within a framework of traditional ideology stifling sexual choice and expression. More-intense religious belief was found to be associated with fewer or no sex partners, with diminished likelihood of oral sex experience, with less frequent masturbation (in women), and with less ability to imagine having homosexual relations (among women who had no history of homosexual activity). Left-wing political views were…
1 min read
