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We Know You Hate ‘Moist.’ What Other Words Repel You?
The New York Times: Moist. Luggage. Crevice. Stroke. Slacks. Phlegm How did those words make you feel? Certain everyday words drive some people crazy, a phenomenon experts call “word aversion.” But one word appears to rise above all others: “moist.” For that reason, a recent paper in the journal PLOS One used the word as a stand-in to explore why people find some terms repellent. “It doesn’t really fit into a lot of existing categories for how people think about the psychology of language,” the study’s author, Paul Thibodeau, a professor of psychology at Oberlin College, said of moist.
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Why Richer People Spend More Time With Their Friends
The Atlantic: In the 1994 movie adaptation of the comic book Richie Rich, Macaulay Culkin plays a boy whose immense wealth keeps him having from a normal, friend-filled childhood. The movie’s happy ending—Richie ditches his stuffy prep-school milieu and becomes rich in friendship with some middle-class kids from the sandlot—points to a reassuring PG-movie morality. However, according to a new study in Social Psychological and Personality Science, it may actually be high earnings that bestow Americans with the ability to spend more time with friends.
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To Help Students Learn, Engage the Emotions
The New York Times: Before she became a neuroscientist, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang was a seventh-grade science teacher at a school outside Boston. One year, during a period of significant racial and ethnic tension at the school, she struggled to engage her students in a unit on human evolution. After days of apathy and outright resistance to Ms.
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The wealthier you get, the less social you are. Here’s why it matters.
Vox: Rich Americans aren't only getting richer. They're becoming more isolated from the rest of America, too. A recent analysis of survey data from more than 100,000 Americans finds that the rich spend significantly less time socializing than low-income Americans. On average, they spend 6.4 fewer evenings per year in social situations. Rich Americans spend less time socializing with their family and neighbors — although they do spend more time socializing with friends. The study is part of a growing body of research that suggests a yawning gap between what it means to be rich and poor in the United States. ...
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Turns Out You Really Do Think Brilliant Thoughts in the Shower
New York Magazine: The timeline of big moments in human history is littered with sudden, seemingly random realizations. Rene Descartes, for instance, came up with the idea for Cartesian geometry while watching a fly zoom around his bedroom. Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” after the fully formed tune plopped itself into his brain (“I woke up one morning with a tune in my head,” he later recalled, “and thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune — or do I?’”) Then there’s the guy who gave the eureka moment its name: Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician who noticed when he settled in for a bath that the density of an object could be measured by the volume of water it displaced.
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Why millennials struggle for success
CNN: "What's wrong with millennials?" This is a question many older Americans are asking. Why do they keep changing their minds about what they want to do with their lives? Why does even a hint of critical feedback send them into a tailspin of self-doubt? In a word, why don't they have more grit? Read the whole story: CNN
