-
The Gift We Love to Receive but Forget to Give
LinkedIn: When you ask people around the world what they value most, one answer consistently rises to the top. It’s giving to the people who matter to us. We want to help others and contribute to our communities. But if you look at how we spend our time, we fail to live up to these values. I’d love to volunteer more, but I don’t have the free time. I’d donate more to charity, if only I had the money. If it didn’t require such a sacrifice, we’d all give more. Yet there’s one form of giving that involves few costs, while offering offers dramatic benefits to the people around us. It’s the single best way to help someone fall in love, and the most common way that people find a job.
-
New Ways to Fight ‘Imposter Fears’
The Wall Street Journal: Feeling as if you don't belong—that you've landed in a fortunate spot by luck or by accident—can send anyone into a tailspin, from college students to corporate executives. Imposter fears are common among men and women alike, research shows, and are blamed for an array of problems, from high college-failure and dropout rates to low female participation in math, engineering and science jobs. ...
-
Yes, Your Toddler Really Is Smarter Than A 5-Year-Old
NPR: Parents, does your 18-month-old seem wise beyond her years? Science says you're not fooling yourself. Very small children can reason abstractly, researchers say, and are able to infer the relationships between objects that elude older children who get caught up on the concreteness of things. In experiments at the University of California, Berkeley, children as young as 18 months were able to figure out the relationship between colored blocks. The child would watch a researcher put two blocks on top of a box. If the blocks were identical, the box would play music. The majority of children were able to figure out the pattern after they were shown it just three times.
-
This president had the most ‘grandiose narcissism’
USA Today: When you're running the country, being narcissistic may come in handy. Psychologists and experts on presidential personalities have put together a list of the presidents who had the most "grandiose narcissism" — which, the Houston Chronicle explains, is characterized by a showy and extroverted personality. That's in contrast to "vulnerable narcissism," which involves being more sensitive. More than 100 authorities on various presidents assessed the leaders' traits; to judge a president's success, researchers referred to surveys of historians, Futurity reports. Our most grandiosely narcissistic president? One Lyndon Baines Johnson, the study finds. ...
-
Some people can ‘see’ in total darkness, study says
USA Today: At least 50 percent of people can see the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light, according to a new study. Kevin Dieter, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, devised experiments to study the phenomenon. How does Dieter explain the finding? "What we normally perceive of as sight is really as much a function of our brains as our eyes," said Dieter, echoing the study's claim published in the journal Psychological Science. The idea for the study came from cognitive science professors Duje Tadin of Rochester University and Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt, who stumbled upon the occurrence while devising experiments for an unrelated study.
-
Why There Are No Atheists at the Grand Canyon
TIME: Any fool can feel religious around the holidays. When the entire Judeo-Christian world is lit up — literally — with celebrations of faith, family and love, you’ve got to be awfully short of wonder not to experience at least a glimmer of spirituality. The rest of the year? It can be a little harder. But as generations of campers, sailors, hikers and explorers could attest, there’s nothing quite like nature — with its ability to elicit feelings of jaw-dropping awe — to make you contemplate the idea of a higher power.
