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Are you Superman or Voldemort? Avatars may affect the real you
CNET: Video games have long provided a safe way for players to try out different personalities. In the land of pixels and pretend, we can try out the role of lithe, attractive do-gooder elf or become a hideous orc who leaves a trail of havoc (and dead elves) in our wake. Most of us probably assume that after the game is over, we return to being simple boyfriends, moms, teachers, or accountants operating according to our own moral principles, regardless of the virtual personas we took on. New research, however, indicates that this just might not be the case.
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Can Shame Predict Whether a Released Felon Will Reoffend?
Pacific Standard: The linguistic distinction between guilt and shame is often blurred. Some of the definitions that Merriam-Webster offers are nearly identical. Guilt is “a bad feeling caused by knowing or thinking that you have done something bad or wrong,” while shame is “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.” In their unending preoccupation with darkness, psychological researchers prefer to parse the details. “Shame and guilt are both self-conscious emotions that arise from self-relevant failures and transgressions, but they differ in their object of evaluation,” a new paper in Psychological Science declares.
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The Brain-Training Secrets Of Olympic Athletes
The Huffington Post: With the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics well underway, millions of spectators are marveling at the physical skill and talent of the athletes competing in the Games. But behind these athletes' physical feats is an arguably even more impressive mental prowess cultivated through years of training the mind to tune out distractions, reduce stress and anxiety and build the focus and stamina they need to achieve optimal performance. In fact, it's not a stretch to say that great athletes succeed because they know how to stay at the top of their game mentally.
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Feel the Noise
National Geographic: If you’ve ever clenched up at the sound of nails on a chalkboard, or felt a pleasant chill when listening to an opera soprano, then you have an intuitive sense of the way our brains sometimes mix information from our senses. For the latest issue of Nautilus magazine I wrote a story about a woman whose brain mixes more than most, allowing her to feel many types of sounds on her skin. Over the past decade or so, neuroscientists have revamped their view of how the brain processes sensory information. According to the traditional model, the cortex, or outer layers of the brain, processes only one sense at a time.
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Les personnes malades sont détectables à l’odeur (Sick people have a detectable odor)
Le Figaro: Bière rance, pain brûlé ou encore viande de boucherie: ces senteurs peu avenantes se dégagent de personnes atteintes respectivement de scrofule (une sorte d'affection tuberculeuse), de fièvre typhoïde et de fièvre jaune. Mais la liste ne semble pas s'arrêter là. Selon différents travaux, les malades émettent en effet différentes odeurs caractéristiques dues à la production de substances volatiles libérées dans le souffle, la transpiration ou encore les urines. Une nouvelle étude parue fin janvier dans Psychological Science va plus loin et montre que ce phénomène apparaît dès les prémices de la maladie et peut être repéré par un nez humain.
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Study: pretending to be Voldemort could increase your villainous behaviour
Wired: Pretending to be Voldemort makes you more dastardly, whereas pretending to be Superman makes you more good natured -- at least, that's according to new research published in Psychological Science, which claims the way in which you decide to represent yourself in a virtual environment can influence your behaviour in the real world. "Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers," says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
