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Are nightmares cathartic?:
pe: Do nightmares increase or decrease anxiety? Theoretical views of nightmares suggest that nightmares play out stressful events, decathecting their energy. A more pragmatic view suggests that nightmares that result in waking distress add to the burden of anxiety. The current study investigates whether negative life events are associated with an increase or decrease in anxiety attributable to nightmares in 624 adolescents aged between 12 and 19. The results indicate no support for a tension reduction hypothesis. There seems no…
1 min read
How does the economy affect popular music?
e lyrical content of Billboard No. 1 songs for each year from 1955 to 2003 was investigated across changes in U.S. social and economic conditions. Consistent with the environmental security hypothesis, popular song lyrics were predicted to have more meaningful themes and content when social and economic conditions were threatening. Trends for more meaningful, comforting, and romantic lyric ratings were observed in more threatening social and economic times. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software, songs with more words per…
1 min read
How can I learn all about WW2 and not be bored to tears?:
listening to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" series, "Ghosts of the Osfront." I think history is a phenomenal subject but it's usually conveyed by bad storytellers, rendering it dry and uninteresting. This is a wonderful exception. You can grab the whole series on iTunes, or get them from his site on MP3: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. And yeah, it's free. Join over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: New Neuroscience Reveals 4…
1 min read
How to make your kid smarter:
sic lessons: In Study 1 (N = 147), duration of music lessons was correlated positively with IQ and with academic ability among 6- to 11-year-olds, even when potential confounding variables (i.e., family income, parents' education, involvement in nonmusical activities) were held constant. In Study 2 (N = 150), similar but weaker associations between playing music in childhood and intellectual functioning were evident among undergraduates. In both studies, there was no evidence that musical involvement had stronger associations with some aspects…
1 min read
What the hell is wrong with Australian Gambling researchers?:
rmally I don't post stuff that's just odd and doesn't provide some level of insight. I'm making an exception here because of just how absurd this is. Who decided this was needed? Tourists at the Koorana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Coowonga, Queensland, Australia, including 62 males and 41 females, aged 18–66 (M = 34.2, SD = 13.3), were randomly assigned to play a laptop-simulated Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) either: (1) prior to entry, or (2) after having held a 1-m saltwater-crocodile. Gambling behavior; including…
1 min read
Is it really “funny because it’s true”?
the "truth" resonates with the listener, yes: This study tests the folk psychological belief that we find things funny because we think they are true. Specifically, it addresses the relationship between implicit preferences and laughter. Fifty-nine undergraduate Rutgers University students (33 females and 26 males) from ethnically diverse backgrounds were videotaped while watching a white stand-up comedian for 30 min. Positive emotional expression associated with laughter was later scored using the facial action coding system (FACS). Computer-timed Implicit Association…
1 min read
How science can improve your “March Madness” bracket and win you some money:
op predicting so many upsets: Every year, billions of dollars are spent gambling on the outcomes of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. This study examines how individuals make predictions for tournament pools, one of the most popular forms of betting, in which individuals must correctly predict as many games in the tournament as possible. We demonstrate that individuals predict more upsets (i.e., wins by a higher seeded team) than would be considered rational by a normative choice model, and that…
2 minutes
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
