Is depression as deadly as smoking? Is anxiety good for you?
study by researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King's College London has found that depression is as much of a risk factor for mortality as smoking. Utilising a unique link between a survey of over 60,000 people and a comprehensive mortality database, the researchers found that over the four years following the survey, the mortality risk was increased to a similar extent in people who were depressed as in people who…
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How organized crime works in Japan:
in over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert
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We’re Only Human…: “The Piece of Cake Heuristic”
n’t bother searching your long-term memory. There is no “Piece of Cake Heuristic.” I just made that up. I made it up and capitalized the main words and threw in an obscure word and added quotation marks—all so you, the reader, might consider the concept intellectually important and worthy of your attention. After all, it has a name and it’s in print—so it must have some heft, right? Well, maybe--or maybe not, according to new research. University of Chicago…
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Do Romantic Rivals Spur Religiosity?
cording to a newly published study, college students who viewed photos of attractive people of their own gender described themselves as "significantly more religious" than their peers. In contrast, viewing photos of attractive members of the opposite sex — that is, potential mates — had no impact on the personal piety meter. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers Yexin Jessica Li, Adam Cohen, Jason Weeden and Douglas Kenrick of Arizona State University describe two experiments examining romance and religiosity.…
1 min read
Read this if you are kind, strong willed, but can be self-critical:
a Mind Hacks: ...Bertram Forer gave a personality test to his students and then asked each person to rate how the accuracy of their 'individual personality profile'. In reality, all the 'individual profiles' were identical but students tended to rate the descriptions as highly accurate. In fact, on a scale of 1-5, students rated the accuracy of their profile, on average, as 4.2. This is the profile Forer used: You have a great need for other people to like and…
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Does playing against Tiger Woods make your golf game worse?
ccess is intimidating. When we compete against someone who's supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson of a new working paper by Jennifer Brown, a professor at the Kellogg school. Brown demonstrated this psychological flaw by analyzing data from every player in every PGA tournament from 1999 to 2006. The reason she chose golf is that…
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Gambling revenues: Hitting the jackpot
a recent draw for EuroMillions, an association of nine European lotteries, two sets of entrants from Britain shared winnings of over €102m ($152m). The odds of scooping that jackpot were one in 76m, but for those who run lotteries lucrative returns are almost guaranteed. Lotteries in Europe, which are mainly state-run, generate more revenues than other sorts of gambling. Americans and Asians are fonder of casinos. Gambling as an industry is growing: global revenues increased by 24% in the…
1 min read
Don’t be happy, be worried: Sports fans need negative emotions to enjoy a game:
r sports fans watching their favorite team play, the greatest enjoyment comes only with a strong dollop of fear and maybe even near-despair, a new study suggests. Researchers studied fans of two college football teams as they watched the teams' annual rivalry game on television. They found that fans of the winning team who, at some point during the game, were almost certain their team would lose, ended up thinking the game was the most thrilling and suspenseful. "You don't…
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