Does having a lot on your mind reduce your ability to experience emotion?
propose that experience of emotion is a mental phenomenon, which requires resources. This hypothesis implies that a concurrent cognitive load diminishes the intensity of feeling since the 2 activities are competing for the same resources. Two sets of experiments tested this hypothesis. The first line of experiments (Experiments 1–4) examined the intensity of participants' feelings as they performed a secondary (backward counting) task. The results showed that the intensity of both negative and positive feelings diminished under a cognitive…
1 min read
Does the type of glass affect how much a bartender pours?
troduction and Aims. Alcohol content in drinks has been shown to be variable. This study evaluates claims regarding the effects of glass size and glass shape on the amount of alcohol served in on-premise drinks. Design and Methods. Wine and spirits drinks were purchased and measured in 80 on-premise establishments in 10 Northern California Counties. Alcohol content was measured as the liquid volume of the drink multiplied by the percentage alcohol by volume of given brands or from analysis of…
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How many of your Facebook friends actually influence your behavior?
e success of Internet social networking sites depends on the number and activity levels of their user members. Although users typically have numerous connections to other site members (i.e., “friends”), only a fraction of those so-called friends may actually influence a member's site usage. Because the influence of potentially hundreds of friends needs to be evaluated for each user, inferring precisely who is influential—and, therefore, of managerial interest for advertising targeting and retention efforts—is difficult. The authors develop an approach…
1 min read
An Easy Way To Get More People To Vote, Backed By Research
nd them a text message: Current explanations of effective voter mobilization strategies maintain that turnout increases only when a potential voter is persuaded to participate through increased social connectedness. The connectedness explanation does not take into account, however, that registered voters, by registering, have already signaled their interest in voting. The theory presented in this article predicts that impersonal, noticeable messages can succeed in increasing the likelihood that a registered voter will turn out by reminding the recipient that Election Day…
1 min read
Why do men get so sexually aggressive when they drink?
m sure there are multiple reasons but here's a novel one: alcohol inhibits men's ability to distinguish between female friendliness and sexual interest. Doesn't hurt their ability to tell the difference between conservative and provocative clothing though: The current investigation examines the etiology of men's errors in sexual perception after moderate alcohol use. Sensitivity and bias estimates, derived from multidimensional signal detection analysis, revealed that men's alcohol-influenced performance was associated with declining sensitivity to the distinction between women's friendliness and…
1 min read
Are daydreamers better liars?
is study investigated whether high fantasy-prone individuals have superior storytelling abilities. It also explored whether this trait is related to specific linguistic features (i.e. self-references, cognitive complexity, and emotional words). Participants high (n = 30) and low (n = 30) on a fantasy proneness scale were instructed to write down a true and a fabricated story about an aversive situation in which they had been the victim. Stories were then examined using two verbal lie detection approaches: criteria-based content analysis…
1 min read
Is it a myth that pregnant women should not drink coffee?
e authors conducted a cohort study within the Danish National Birth Cohort to determine whether coffee consumption during pregnancy is associated with late fetal death (spontaneous abortion and stillbirth). A total of 88,482 pregnant women recruited from March 1996 to November 2002 participated in a comprehensive interview on coffee consumption and potentially confounding factors in pregnancy. Information on pregnancy outcome was obtained from the National Hospital Discharge Register and medical records. The authors detected 1,102 fetal deaths. High levels of…
1 min read
How to easily improve your memory and test taking ability in 10 minutes:
ending just 10 minutes talking to another person can help improve your memory and your performance on tests, according to a University of Michigan study to be published in the February 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. "In our study, socializing was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance," said Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and a lead author of the…
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