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The Real Reason So Many of Us Crave the Apple Watch
TIME: No one really needs an Apple Watch. Yes, it will have many uses, including tracking exercise, making mobile payments, reading email, and running all sorts of apps. But smartphones and other devices are capable of doing all of these things and more. So why do so many of us want an Apple Watch? A month ago, I was riding in an elevator in San Francisco (45 minutes from Apple headquarters) and noticed someone wearing what appeared to be an Apple Watch. I asked him if it was indeed the much-hyped unreleased watch. He said yes. He also said I couldn’t touch it. Okay, no problem, but how about giving me a quick review? No dice. Fine, at least tell me how it is that you got one.
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When Fatigue Boosts Creativity
The Atlantic: Most people know, instinctively, whether they are morning people or evening people. Some are hit with a wave of dread whenever they hear a stranger’s iPhone clanging out the same ringtone as their morning alarm. Others can be found yawning into their second beer at 10 p.m. on a Friday. (For those who aren’t sure, countless online questionnaires can tell you whether you should be catching the worm or not.) Our chronotypes are largely a function of when our bodies start and stop producing melatonin, the sleepiness hormone. Elementary and middle schoolers tend to be early risers, but productivity begins to shift to later in the day as people enter their teens and early 20s.
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The Toll of a Solitary Life
The New York Times: Do you like being alone? New research from Brigham Young University shows just how bad loneliness and social isolation, even for people who prefer their own company, can be for health. The researchers analyzed data collected from 70 studies and more than 3.4 million people from 1980 to 2014. The studies, which followed people for about seven years on average, showed that people who were socially isolated, lonely or living alone had about a 30 percent higher chance of dying during a given study period than those who had regular social contact.
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From Sadness to Anxiety: The Emotional Legacy of Sandy Hook
Pacific Standard: The truism—apparently first uttered by Steve Allen, the original host of the Tonight Show—is that tragedy plus time equals comedy. But a newly published study that looked at responses to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre suggests a different equation: Tragedy plus time equals anxiety. Analyzing a large dataset of Twitter messages, a Columbia University research team led by psychologists Bruce Doré and Kevin Ochsner found a decrease in sadness-related words the further removed commenters were from the horrible incident, in terms of either time or distance.
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Gender equality in science: a better future for everyone
The Guardian: The scarcity of women in the ranks of working scientists has been in the news for a discouragingly long time. But research studies designed to explain the reasons for this gender disparity are filled contradictions, mainly because they were conducted at different times and on different science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Last year the Association for Psychological Research published a monograph about women in STEM fields in their journal, Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
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Speaking a second language may change how you see the world
Science: Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences, influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study. The work also finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more flexible. ... The results suggest that a second language can play an important unconscious role in framing perception, the authors conclude online this month in Psychological Science.
