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Does sitting at a big desk make you cheat?
The Washington Post: There could be an upside to being confined to that tiny cubicle at work: It may make you less likely to cheat. A new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science finds that sitting at a large workspace or in a big seat in a car can make people feel more powerful — and therefore, lead them to act more deceptively. The research, titled “The Ergonomics of Dishonesty,” was led by Andy Yap of MIT (who conducted the research while at Columbia University) and Dana Carney of the University of California, Berkeley.
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What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows
The New York Times: Not long after moving to the University of Southampton, Constantine Sedikides had lunch with a colleague in the psychology department and described some unusual symptoms he’d been feeling. A few times a week, he was suddenly hit with nostalgia for his previous home at the University of North Carolina: memories of old friends, Tar Heel basketball games, fried okra, the sweet smells of autumn in Chapel Hill. ... In the 19th and 20th centuries nostalgia was variously classified as an “immigrant psychosis,” a form of “melancholia” and a “mentally repressive compulsive disorder” among other pathologies. But when Dr.
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ADHD Drugs Don’t Boost Kids’ Grades
The Wall Street Journal: It's no longer shocking to hear of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—and others simply facing a big test—taking ADHD medicine to boost their performance in school. But new studies point to a problem: There's little evidence that the drugs actually improve academic outcomes. Stimulants used to treat ADHD like Ritalin and Adderall are sometimes called "cognitive enhancers" because they have been shown in a number of studies to improve attention, concentration and even certain types of memory in the short-term. Similar drugs were given to World War II soldiers to improve their ability to stay alert while scanning radars for enemy aircraft. ...
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The Surprising Benefits Of Working Backward
Forbes: The exercise, and its reward, put me in mind of how coming at things backward, awkwardly and in uncertain steps can lead to unanticipated and astonishing breakthroughs. And how discoveries can be made at this intersection of the comedic and the sublime. ... The value of this tactic isn’t just the stuff of folk wisdom and unexpected discoveries. Dutch neuroscientists were curious whether different mental processes are employed when we are walking toward something or away from it. Their study, published in Psychological Science in May 2009, found that subjects who walked even a few steps backward were far more focused and attentive than those who didn’t. Read the whole story: Forbes
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Why Self-Consciousness Peaks in Teenage Years
LiveScience: Some of the more awkward growth spurts that mark adolescence occur in the brain, and a new study suggests certain developmental changes might make teens ultra-sensitive to the gaze of other people. ... "We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," study researcher Leah Somerville, a psychological scientist at Harvard University, said in a statement. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement." Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Studies show how to be better consumers
Chicago Tribune: Would you pay 50 percent more for "organic" firewood? Would you be more willing to buy a used refrigerator if it had an "attractive enamel-coated ferromagnetic exterior?" Would you be more likely to buy juice from a server with a British accent? Of course, all firewood is organic, magnets stick to many refrigerators, and the desire for juice should be unrelated to a seller's accent. Still, we consumers are not always rational and can be tricked by sellers. We sometimes open our wallets for marketing gimmicks like these examples from a message board posting on Reddit.com. There's a whole area of academic study about consumer behavior that examines not what we buy, but why.
