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Playing Video Games Can Help Or Hurt, Depending On Whom You Ask
NPR: Parents worry that video games are bad for kids, but the evidence on how and why they may be harmful has been confusing. "Most of popular media puts the most emphasis of concern on aggression," says psychologist Jay Hull from Dartmouth College. "But aggression is just the tip of the iceberg." So Hull looked at other negative behaviors that could be affected by gaming, including binge drinking, smoking cigarettes and unprotected sex. His study found that teenagers who regularly play violent video games such as Manhunt and the Grand Theft Auto series are more likely to take those risks. The study was published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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To Work Better, Work Less
The Atlantic: Between 1853 and 1870, Baron Haussmann ordered much of Paris to be destroyed. Slums were razed and converted to bourgeois neighborhoods, and the formerly labyrinthine city became a place of order, full of wide boulevards (think Saint-Germain) and angular avenues (the Champs-Élysées). Poor Parisians tried to put up a fight but were eventually forced to flee, their homes knocked down with minimal notice and little or no recompense. The city underwent a full transformation—from working class and medieval to bourgeois and modern—in less than two decades' time. Every August, Paris now sees another rapid transformation. Tourists rule the picturesque streets. Shops are shuttered.
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Combat Stress Among Veterans Is Found to Persist Since Vietnam
The New York Times: Most veterans who had persistent post-traumatic stress a decade or more after serving in the Vietnam War have shown surprisingly little improvement since then, and a large percentage have died, a new study finds, updating landmark research that began a generation ago. Members of minorities who enlisted before finishing high school were especially likely to develop such war-related trauma, as were those veterans who had killed multiple times in combat, the study found.
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These Are Twitter’s Biggest Secrets
TIME: What makes us follow, fave, share and—most importantly—keep coming back When I choose someone new to follow, when I compose a new tweet, when I share and favorite an update, I seldom think about the why. My following sessions would probably seem haphazard to an outsider, and my favoriting technique comes and goes from one strategy to another. ... I’ve hit more than my fair share of Twitter wormholes—minutes that turn to hours as I find more and more tweets to read and share. Does that sound familiar to you, too? I figured there was a psychological reason behind the draw of Twitter.
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Poco sonno induce falsi ricordi (Little sleep inducing false memories)
La Stampa: La vita frenetica vi costringe a dormire sempre meno? Sappiate che stanchezza, debolezza e nervosismo potrebbero non essere gli unici problemi cui potreste incappare.Secondo una recente ricerca pubblicata su Psychological Science – una rivista della Association for Psychological Science – non dormire a sufficienza potrebbe aumentare la probabilità di avere falsi ricordi.Per arrivare a tali conclusioni, lo psicologo Steven J. Frenda della University of California ha privato del sonno un centinaio di volontari che hanno partecipato allo studio.
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Brains At Play
NPR: This week at NPR Ed, our series Playing To Learn will explore questions about why people play and how play relates to learning. Why do we humans like to play so much? Play sports, play tag, play the stock market, play duck, duck, goose? We love it all. And we're not the only ones. Dogs, cats, bears, even birds seem to like to play. What are we all doing? Is there a point to it all? The scientist who has perhaps done more research on brains at play than any other is a man named Jaak Panksepp. And he has developed a pretty good hypothesis. In a nutshell, he, and many others, think play is how we social animals learn the rules of being social.
