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…
1 min read
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…
1 min read
Which countries drink the most?
urce: The Economist via Flowing Data: "The world drank the equivalent of 6.1 litres of pure alcohol per person in 2005, according to a report from the World Health Organisation published on February 11th. The biggest boozers are mostly found in Europe and in the former Soviet states. Moldovans are the most bibulous, getting through 18.2 litres each, nearly 2 litres more than the Czechs in second place." Join over 190,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: How To…
1 min read
You Know When Your First Impressions Are Accurate
people have insight into the validity of their first impressions or accuracy awareness? Across two large interactive round-robins, those who reported having formed a more accurate impression of a specific target had (a) a more distinctive realistically accurate impression, accurately perceiving the target’s unique personality characteristics as described by the target’s self-, parent-, and peer-reports, and (b) a more normatively accurate impression, perceiving the target to be similar to what people generally tend to be like. Specifically, if a perceiver…
2 minutes
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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Can photos reduce pain?
s. Photos of loved ones can reduce pain and in some situations might be better than having the real person present: These findings confirm the notion that simply viewing a loved one’s picture can have pain-attenuating effects, and they fit with social psychological research showing that being primed with a social construct is enough to activate associated mental representations and to bias behavior (Ferguson & Bargh, 2004). Thus, seeing photographs of loved ones may prime associated mental representations of being loved and supported, which may…
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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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You Can Be Allergic To Orgasms
s, you really can be allergic to orgasms: Introduction. Postorgasmic illness syndrome (POIS) is a combination of local allergic symptoms and transient flu-like illness. In this study, the investigators propose five preliminary criteria to establish the diagnosis. Aim. To describe the clinical details in 45 males being suspected of having POIS and to test an immunogenic hypothesis as the underlying mechanism of their presentations. Methods. Forty-five males were studied according to standardized protocol, including neuropsychiatric and medical sexological evaluations; their complaints were categorized…
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