This Body Language Means You’re About To Be Cheated
a Wray Herbert, author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits: Then they isolated the specific cluster of cues that were actually present when volunteers successfully detected others’ self-serving intentions. Again and again, it was a cluster of four cues: hand touching, face touching, crossing arms, and leaning away. None of these cues foretold deceit by itself, but together they transformed into a highly accurate signal. And the more often the participants used this particular cluster of gestures,…
1 min read
The 3 Techniques The US Army Uses To Instill Mental Toughness
a Annie Murphy Paul's very interesting article in Time: 1) "Mental toughness comes from thinking like an optimist." The program’s key message: Mental toughness comes from thinking like an optimist. “People who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local and changeable,” notes Penn psychology professor Martin Seligman, describing the intervention in a recent journal article. When such individuals encounter adversity, they think to themselves: “It’s going away quickly; it’s just this one situation, and I…
1 min read
The Fast Way To Make Better Decisions, Backed By Research
ke the perspective of someone else. Think about what your smartest friend might do in that situation. We investigated how perspective-taking might be used to overcome bias and improve advice-based judgments. Decision makers often tend to underweight the opinions of others relative to their own, and thus fail to exploit the wisdom of others. We tested the idea that decision makers taking the perspective of another person engage a less egocentric mode of processing of advisory opinions and thereby improve their…
2 minutes
The Attractiveness Of Your Real Estate Agent Affects How Much Your House Sells For
nder and attractiveness can affect how much a house sells for and how long it is on the market. Via Marina Adshade: It turns out having a male agent is bad for the selling price of a house. Both male listing agents (those acting on behalf of the seller) and male selling agents (those acting on behalf of the buyer) are associated with lower house prices than their female counterparts. The gender of the agent, however, has no effect on…
1 min read
Do you function better after a Red Bull and vodka vs. just drinking vodka?
, but it will make you think you're functioning better: The consumption of alcohol mixed with energy drinks (AmED) has become a popular and controversial practice among young people. Increased rates of impaired driving and injuries have been associated with AmED consumption. The purpose of this study was to examine if the consumption of AmED alters cognitive processing and subjective measures of intoxication compared with the consumption of alcohol alone. Eighteen participants (nine men and nine women) attended four test…
2 minutes
Do coffee and cigarettes make you smarter?
s. Via Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons: You already know that your morning cup(s) of coffee make(s) you a better person: more alert, more outgoing, increasingly optimistic, better looking, better smelling, nicer, etc. But did you know that coffee actually makes you smarter? It does, really. But only for a short period of time, and when you come down, you’re dumber than you were before taking that first sip (unless you drink more…
1 min read
What do we do with our leisure time: what truly makes us happy or what’s easy?
do what's easy. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: Studies have found that American teenagers are two and half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when watching TV, and three times more likely when playing a sport. And yet here’s the paradox: These same teenagers spend four times as many hours watching TV as they do engaging in sports or hobbies.…
1 min read
Does doodling actually increase your ability to pay attention?
ve posted before about the positives and negatives of daydreaming. Looks like doodling may increase your ability to pay attention when your mind is tempted to wander: Via The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You): Now, we know that mind-wandering can hamper memory performance on such tests. Does doodling offer some protection against this? The results of Andrade’s study: doodlers recalled 29 percent more information than nondoodlers did. Precisely…
1 min read
