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To Get Help From A Little Kid, Ask The Right Way
NPR: Motivating children to stop playing and help out with chores isn't exactly an easy sell, as most parents and teachers will attest. But how you ask can make all the difference, psychologists say. If you say something like, "Please help me," the kids are more likely to keep playing with their Legos. But ask them, "Please be a helper," and they'll be more responsive, researchers report Wednesday in the journal Child Development. Being called a helper makes kids feel like they're embodying a virtue, says Christopher Bryan, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego and one of the researchers behind the study. Read the whole story: NPR
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The Ways Food Tricks Our Brains
The Atlantic: In 1998, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania published a study that might strike you as kind of mean. They took two people with severe amnesia, who couldn’t remember events occurring more than a minute earlier, and fed them lunch. Then a few minutes later, they offered a second lunch. The amnesic patients eagerly ate it. Then a few minutes later, they offered a third lunch, and the patients ate that, too. Days later, they repeated the experiment, telling two people with no short-term memory that it was lunch time over and over and observing them readily eat multiple meals in a short period of time.
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So Much for Your Gut
Inc.: A recent study, led by a Harvard professor and published in the April edition of Psychological Science, found that the ability to discern if others are trustworthy, dominant, and competent just by looking at them is not a skill honed over time and with experience. Read the whole story: Inc.
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Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families
The Wall Street Journal: Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?
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Psychological Consequences Of Calling Obesity A Disease
NPR: I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'd like to thank Celeste Headlee for sitting in for me while I was away. On the program today, we are focusing on some interesting health issues that might be on your mind after a week of holiday meals and family gatherings. Later, we will tell you about some interesting new findings about depression in new mothers who are living in multigenerational households. But we're going to start by talking about obesity, which affects 1 in 3 Americans. Last year, you might remember, the American Medical Association, the nation's largest physicians group, classified obesity as a disease.
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The Search for Our Inner Lie Detectors
The New York Times: Is a job applicant lying to you? What about your boss, or an entrepreneur who is promising to double your investment? Most of us are bad at spotting a lie. At least consciously. New research, published last month in Psychological Science, suggests that we have good instincts for judging liars, but that they are so deeply buried that we can’t get at them. This finding is the work of Leanne ten Brinke, a forensic psychologist — she previously studied parents who killed their children and lied about it — who has turned her attention to the business world. “Perhaps our own bodies know better than our conscious minds who is lying,” explained Dr.
