Should you get wasted the night before a big exam?
re, why not? Despite what I recently posted about drinking negatively affecting performance in college, this study says that binge drinking the night before a test doesn't negatively affect grades: In a first-of-its kind controlled experiment, researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Brown University have found that surprisingly, binge drinking the night before a test does not impact college students' test performance – although it can affect their moods, attention and reaction times. The study,…
2 minutes
Here’s How The Season Of Your Birth Affects Your Future Health And Success
, I'm not talking about astrology. (If you're a regular reader of this blog you can guess what my feelings on astrology might be.) This connection is indirect and has to do with who has babies when: Research has found that season of birth is associated with later health and professional outcomes; what drives this association remains unclear. In this paper we consider a new explanation: that children born at different times in the year are conceived by women with…
3 minutes
Is group studying more effective?
t if you want to remember anything: Humans routinely encode and retrieve experiences in interactive, collaborative contexts. Yet much of what we know about human memory comes from research on individuals working in isolation. Some recent research has examined collaboration during retrieval, but not much is known about how collaboration during encoding affects memory. We examined this issue. Participants created episodes by elaborating on study materials alone or collaboratively, and they later performed a cued-recall task alone, with the study…
1 min read
How To Deal With A Narcissist, Backed By Research
ere are ways to make a narcissist easier to deal with. Emphasize community when you talk to them. When they feel there's a strong group behind something, they're more likely to behave: Three studies tested the hypotheses that the activation of communal mental representations promotes relationship commitment (communal activation hypothesis) and that this effect is stronger among narcissists than among nonnarcissists (Communal Activation x Narcissism hypothesis). Across experimental, longitudinal, and interaction-based research methods, and in participant samples ranging from college…
3 minutes
How to easily increase your persistence in just one second:
oss your arms: Two experiments investigated the hypothesis that arm crossing serves as a proprioceptive cue for perseverance within achievement settings. Experiment 1 found that inducing participants to cross their arms led to greater persistence on an unsolvable anagram. Experiment 2 revealed that arm crossing led to better performance on solvable anagrams, and that this effect was mediated by greater persistence. No differences in comfort, instruction adherence, or mood were observed between the arms crossed and control conditions, and participants…
1 min read
The secret to getting a job:
u have to network. Yeah, you've heard that a million times already. I can show you what it really does and why it's one of the most important things to focus on: We assess the information spillovers generated by the exchange of job-related information within networks of fellow workers exploiting administrative records covering all employment relationships established in a specific local labor market over 20 years. We recover individual-specific networks of former colleagues for a sample of workers exogenously displaced…
4 minutes
What can you accurately tell about a person just by looking at their face?
lot, actually: Several studies have demonstrated some accuracy in personality attribution using only visual appearance. Using composite images of those scoring high and low on a particular trait, the current study shows that judges perform better than chance in guessing others' personality, particularly for the traits conscientiousness and extraversion. This study also shows that attractiveness, masculinity and age may all provide cues to assess personality accurately and that accuracy is affected by the sex of both of those judging…
1 min read
How can you improve learning while you sleep?
onomists are fond of telling us that "people respond to incentives." It seems that's true even when we're passed out on the couch: Sleep is known to promote the consolidation of motor memories. In everyday life, typically more than 1 isolated motor skill is acquired at a time, and this possibly gives rise to interference during consolidation. Here, it is shown that reward expectancy determines the amount of sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Subjects were trained on 2 different sequences of a…
2 minutes
