What’s an easy way to feel more powerful?
wer your voice: Voice pitch may not only influence the listeners but also the speakers themselves. Based on the theories of embodied cognition and previous research on power, we tested whether lowering their pitch leads people to feel more powerful and think more abstractly. In three experiments, participants received instructions to read a text out loud with either a lower or a higher voice than usual. Subsequently, feelings of power (Experiments 1 and 2) and abstract thinking (Experiment 3) were…
1 min read
How can you improve the quality of your sleep at night and feel less tired during the day?
ercise for 2.5hrs a week: via Eurekalert A nationally representative sample of more than 2,600 men and women, ages 18-85, found that 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week, which is the national guideline, provided a 65 percent improvement in sleep quality. People also said they felt less sleepy during the day, compared to those with less physical activity. And: 'Our findings demonstrate a link between regular physical activity and perceptions of sleepiness during the day, which suggests…
1 min read
Here’s Why Women Fake Orgasms
e of the reasons is to hold on to a guy they think might be prone to straying: The current study tested the hypothesis that women pretend orgasm as part of a broader strategy of mate retention. We obtained self-report data from 453 heterosexual women (M age, 21.8 years) in a long-term relationship (M length, 32.8 months) drawn from universities and surrounding communities in the southeastern United States. The results indicated that (1) women who perceived higher risk of partner infidelity were…
1 min read
5 Easy, Scientifically Proven Tips To Make Your Holiday Shopping Easier
Want to pick a creative gift that the receiver will be surprised by? Don't do it. Studies show people are much more satisfied by presents they said they wanted. 2) Accept that context can warp your thinking. The music in a store, a "SALE" sign, and how many items are on a shelf can all affect what and how much you buy. 3) To control your spending, hide the credit card and make sure your wallet contains only big…
1 min read
5 easy, scientifically-proven tips for controlling your eating over the holidays:
Eating slowly allows more time for the "full" feeling to kick in. 2) Eat off a small plate. Without realizing it, we often judge whether we're done by visual cues like an empty plate. 3) Keep the serving dishes in the kitchen. Merely having to get up to get more makes us less likely to keep eating. 4) Sit next to the people who are skinny and who never eat much. We're influenced by those around us, even if…
1 min read
This Is Why Americans Keep Getting Fatter
rget all the wild theories; it's actually quite simple: we eat too many calories. Table 2 shows changes in food consumption between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s for males and females. The top row in each panel reports overall caloric intake. Reported consumption increased by 268 calories for men and 143 calories for women between the two surveys. This increase is more than enough to explain the increase in steady-state weight. So why did Americans suddenly start eating more calories?…
3 minutes
Do women and men have different moral values?
om a very interesting piece by Jesse Prinz: By the late 1980s, the evidence for gender differences in morality was regarded as weak, but now the tide is changing. A number of intriguing findings have been reported in the literature. Here are some highlights: • Some studies show that women are more empathetic then men, and that this difference increases over child development (for example, there's a nice study showing this trend in Spain by María Mestre and collaborators). •…
2 minutes
Does reading fiction make us nicer?
s. Reading fiction makes us more likely to do kind things for others: Theorists from diverse disciplines purport narrative fiction serves to foster empathic development and growth. In two studies, participants’ subjective, behavioral, and perceptual responses were observed after reading a short fictional story. In study 1, participants who were more transported into the story exhibited higher affective empathy and were more likely to engage in prosocial behavior. In study 2, reading-induced affective empathy was related to greater bias toward…
1 min read
