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Days late, dollars short
The Economist: There is a distinctive psychology of scarcity, argues Mr Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, a psychologist at Princeton University. People’s minds work differently when they feel they lack something. And it does not greatly matter what that something is. Anyone who feels strapped for money, friends, time or calories is likely to succumb to a similar “scarcity mindset”. This mindset brings two benefits. It concentrates the mind on pressing needs. It also gives people a keener sense of the value of a dollar, minute, calorie or smile. The lonely, it turns out, are better at deciphering expressions of emotion. Likewise, the poor have a better grasp of costs.
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La separazione aumenta il rischio di depressione, ma solo per alcune persone (divorce increases the risk of depression, but only for some)
La Stampa: La separazione o il divorzio in una coppia sono eventi particolarmente stressanti, che possono portare a problemi mentali – specie in chi è più sensibile. Tra i diversi problemi di salute mentale cui si può incorrere c’è la depressione che, secondo un nuovo studio, è più probabile si manifesti in chi è predisposto perché in passato ha già sperimentato episodi depressivi. Lo studio è stato pubblicato su Clinical Psychological Science, una rivista della Association for Psychological Science, ed è stato condotto dai ricercatori dell’Università dell’Arizona.
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Multitasking After 60: Video Game Boosts Focus, Mental Agility
NPR: A brain that trains can stay in the fast lane. That's the message of a showing that playing a brain training video game for a month can rejuvenate the multitasking abilities of people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. "After training, they improved their multitasking beyond the level of 20-year-olds," says Adam Gazzaley, one of the study's authors and a brain scientist at the University of California, San Francisco. And the improvement extended beyond multitasking, Gazzaley says: Participants also got better at remembering information and paying attention. Moreover, the training actually changed participants' brains. Brain wave patterns associated with focus got stronger, Gazzaley says.
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To Change Environmental Behavior, Should We Really Tell People the World Is Ending?
The Huffington Post: This post was co-authored with Elke U. Weber, the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business at Columbia University's Business School. This past week, a report leaked from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated with near certainty that the environmental changes from the last several decades have been caused by people. Perhaps not surprisingly, these types of reports have been met with media coverage that ranges from grim to apocalyptic. An earlier report by the IPCC prompted the fear-evoking 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth. No less dire warnings about the planet's future abound today.
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Bias in the Court
Pacific Standard: On November 14, 1978, a Texas jury found Thomas Barefoot guilty of the murder of Bell County police officer Carl Levin. Based on the gravity of the crime and the testimony of two psychiatrists who claimed that Barefoot would pose a continued menace to society, that same jury recommended the death penalty. Barefoot appealed. The psychiatrists, he argued, had no grounds on which to predict his future dangerousness. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which rejected his claim, affirming the merit of the mental health experts and denying a stay of execution. On October 30, 1984, Barefoot was put to death by lethal injection. ...
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Can Science Show Us Secrets Of Making Better Decisions?
The Huffington Post Day in and day out, we make decisions--some tough, some trivial, some good, some bad. And as Yale University neurobiologist Dr. Daeyeol Lee told The Huffington Post in an email, "poor decision-making in many domains, including finance, family, and health can all dramatically affect our well-being." What's really going on in our brains as we make decisions? Are there steps we can take to become better decision-makers? For answers to these and other questions, HuffPost Science turned to Dr. Lee, a professor of neurobiology and psychology at Yale and director of the university's laboratory of cognition and decision-making. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
