3 ways playing video games can improve your life:
Video games might make you more creative. From Eurekalert: Both boys and girls who play video games tend to be more creative, regardless of whether the games are violent or nonviolent, according to new research by Michigan State University scholars. A study of nearly 500 12-year-olds found that the more kids played video games, the more creative they were in tasks such as drawing pictures and writing stories. In contrast, use of cell phones, the Internet and computers (other than…
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Comedy Is Good For You
om the Washington Post: There is a growing body of research indicating that a good guffaw may improve immune function, help lower blood pressure, boost mood and reduce stress and depression. And despite a dearth of more rigorous, long-term studies, the sum of these findings is compelling, says cardiologist Michael Miller, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has researched the topic. “We don’t have any clinical outcome evidence to show that laughter will reduce heart attacks or improve overall survival. However, we do…
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Is offering candy to dieters a great way to sell them a car?
lf-control is a limited resource. When we use it to resist temptation we have less left to defend against persuasive appeals: Four studies investigated a self-control theory of resistance to persuasion. This theory asserts that resistance to persuasion requires and consumes self-control resources. Study 1 showed that resistance to a persuasive message reduced the ability to engage in a subsequent self-control task. Studies 2 and 3 showed that self-control depletion leads to increased persuasion. Study 4 showed that self-control depletion…
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Is self-deception one of the keys to optimal performance?
..Overall, the results were consistent with the proposition that self-deception enhances motivation and performance during competition." Hat tip: Ray Pawulich: We investigated the relationship between self-deception and success in competition. Self-deception has been associated with stress reduction, a positive self-bias, and increased pain tolerance, all of which could enhance motivation and performance during competitive tasks. We selected athletic competition as a model and predicted that swimmers who successfully qualified for a national championship would engage in more self-deception than swimmers…
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Can the smell of cookies make us nicer to each other?
a preliminary study, passersby in a large shopping mall were significantly more likely to help a same-sex accomplice (by retrieving a dropped pen or providing change for a dollar) when these helping opportunities took place in the presence of pleasant ambient odors (e.g., baking cookies, roasting coffee) than in the absence of such odors. Participants also reported significantly higher levels of positive affect in the presence of pleasant odors. In a second study, the order in which passersby were…
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Does fantasizing give you the motivation to achieve your goals?
pe. Fantasies sap the energy you need to achieve your goals: Positive fantasies allow people to mentally indulge in a desired future. Whereas previous research found that spontaneously generated positive fantasies about the future predict poor achievement, we examined the effect of experimentally induced positive fantasies about the future. The present four experiments identify low energy, measured by physiological and behavioral indicators, as a mechanism by which positive fantasies translate into poor achievement. Induced positive fantasies resulted in less energy…
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Can I predict how happy you’ll be in the coming years by looking at your Facebook profile?
es the extent to which people are smiling in their Facebook photos predict future life satisfaction? In two longitudinal studies, the authors showed that smile intensity coded from a single Facebook profile photograph from male and female participants’ first semester at college was a robust predictor of self-reported life satisfaction 3.5 years later—as they were about to graduate from college. Controlling for first-semester life satisfaction, the authors also determined that smile intensity was a unique predictor of changes in life…
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Is your boss a narcissist?
re likely than not: These studies investigate whether individuals with high narcissism scores would be more likely to emerge as leaders during leaderless group discussions. The authors hypothesized that narcissists would emerge as group leaders. In three studies, participants completed personality questionnaires and engaged in four-person leaderless group discussions. Results from all three studies reveal a link between narcissism and leader emergence. Studies 1 and 2 further reveal that the power dimension of narcissism predicted reported leader emergence while controlling…
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