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Loneliness can literally hurt your heart, scientists say
The Washington Post: That pang in the middle of your chest when you feel lonely may not just be in your head. Researchers reported in the journal Heart this week that poor social relationships could actually hurt your heart. The study involved what is known as a meta-analysis of 23 previous studies involving 181,000 people. This involves taking the raw data, pooling it and reanalyzing it. In total, the studies included 4,628 cases of cardiovascular disease and 3,002 stroke cases. The researchers found that being lonely or socially isolated appeared to be associated with a 29 percent increase in risk of heart disease and with a 32 percent increase in risk of stroke. ...
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Who was a real US president, Alexander Hamilton or Chester Arthur? Most Americans get the answer wrong.
Discover: Americans aren’t exactly known for our knowledge of history (or geography, for that matter). But we should at least know our own presidents, right? Enter these researchers, who used an online survey to measure how well people can distinguish real US presidents from others with well-known or presidential-sounding names. They found that, while people were actually able to recognize 88% of US presidents by name (the exceptions including lesser known presidents like Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur), they were also likely to incorrectly identify several non-presidents, including Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.
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Merging Career And Motherhood, In Simultaneous Practice
NPR: A few years ago, I received an early career award at the annual meeting of a professional society. Before the awards ceremony, the other recipients and I were herded together, placed in adjacent seats, and told to wait for the event to begin. The five or six of us had a lot in common. Though we worked in different areas of psychology, we were at similar career stages and had overlapping interests. But we didn't spend our time together talking about science or ideas — the work that had won us the awards we were there to receive. What we talked about was childcare. Read the whole story: NPR
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Angela Duckworth on Passion, Grit and Success
The New York Times: Angela Duckworth was teaching math when she noticed something intriguing: The most successful students weren’t always the ones who displayed a natural aptitude; rather, they displayed something she came to think of as grit. Later, as a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she defined the term — a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal — and created a tool to measure it: the “grit scale,” which predicted outcomes like who would graduate from West Point or win the National Spelling Bee. As a result of this work, Dr. Duckworth was named a MacArthur “genius” in 2013, and the notion of grit has become widely known.
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Can You Trust a Eureka Moment?
Scientific American: Aha! moments are satisfying in part because they feel so right; all the pieces of a puzzle appear to fall into place with little conscious effort. But can you trust such sudden solutions? Yes, according to new research published in Thinking & Reasoning. The results support the conventional wisdom that this type of insight can provide correct answers to challenging problems. In four experiments, Carola Salvi, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, and their colleagues presented college students with mind teasers, such as anagrams and rebus puzzles.
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How to Boast on the Sly
The Atlantic: An essential quandary of social life is how to let others know we’re awesome, without letting them know we want them to know. Is there a way to harvest the reputational benefits of self-promotion while avoiding its costs? Research exposes boasting’s pitfalls. For example, when we brag, we miscalculate how others will react. In one study, self-promoters overestimated the extent to which their audiences would feel “proud” and “happy,” and underestimated their annoyance.
