Houseplants make your mind sharper
is research studied possible benefits of indoor plants on attention capacity in a controlled laboratory experiment. Participants were 34 students randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an office setting with four indoor plants, both flowering and foliage, or the same setting without plants. Attention capacity was assessed three times, i.e. immediately after entering the laboratory, after performing a demanding cognitive task, and after a five-minute break. Attention capacity was measured using a reading span test, a dual processing task…
1 min read
Does being in a good mood make your memory worse?
me evidence suggests that positive mood influences cognitive control. The current research investigated whether positive mood has differential effects on two aspects of cognitive control, working memory and prepotent response inhibition. In Study 1, following either a positive or neutral mood induction, participants completed the Running Memory Span (RMS), a measure primarily of working memory storage capacity, and the Stroop task, a measure of prepotent response inhibition. Results were that the positive mood group performed worse on the RMS task…
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Do “beer goggles” really make people seem more attractive?
e popular notion that alcohol intoxication enhances perceptions of the physical attractiveness of the opposite sex has been inconsistently supported. The current study tested intoxicated and non-intoxicated persons of both genders in naturalistic settings after measuring their blood alcohol concentration (BAC) by a breath test. A sample of 80 heterosexual university student social drinkers was recruited at a campus pub and campus parties over a 3-month period to take a survey rating the attractiveness of unfamiliar faces of the opposite…
1 min read
What makes a sporting event great?
n satisfaction with individual sports games is likely to be an important indicator of future sales of tickets, television and radio advertising, and team merchandise sales. For the 2009-2010 National Football League (NFL) season, NFL.com, the official website of the NFL, had fans enter a ‘‘fan rating’’ for each game of the season. This rating was on a scale of 0—100 with 100 being the most memorable. Using these figures, the authors test the economic hypotheses of the importance of…
1 min read
Another way to improve your memory:
t on it: The present study examined how younger and older adults choose to selectively remember important information. Participants studied words paired with point values, and “bet” on whether they could later recall each word. If they bet on and recalled the word, they received the points, but if they failed to recall it, they lost those points. Participants (especially older adults) initially bet on more words than they later recalled, but greatly improved with task experience. The incorporation of…
1 min read
Can prayer make you feel better — even if you’re not religious?
om Eurekalert: A series of studies showed that people who were provoked by insulting comments from a stranger showed less anger and aggression soon afterwards if they prayed for another person in the meantime... "We found that prayer really can help people cope with their anger, probably by helping them change how they view the events that angered them and helping them take it less personally." The power of prayer also didn't rely on people being particularly religious, or attending church…
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Are some alcoholic beverages more associated with homicide?
troduction and Aims. Previous research from Western Europe and North America has suggested that consuming different types of alcoholic beverage may have differing effects on homicide rates both within and between countries. The aim of this study was to examine the relation between the consumption of different beverage types and homicide rates in Russia across the later-Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Design and Methods. Age-standardised male and female homicide data for the period 1970–2005 and data on beverage-specific alcohol sales were…
2 minutes
Are bilinguals better at creative problem solving?
at makes a person able to solve problems creatively? One interesting factor that may contribute is experience with multiple languages from an early age. Bilingual individuals who acquire two languages by the age of 6 have been shown to demonstrate superior performance on a number of thinking tasks that require flexibility. However, bilingual advantages have yet to be identified particularly on insight problems that are used as a model of creative problem solving following initial impasse. As such, the goal…
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