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Selling Kids On Veggies When Rules Like ‘Clean Your Plate’ Fail
NPR: If you're a parent, you've probably heard remarks like this during dinner: "I don't like milk! My toast is burnt! I hate vegetables! I took a bite already! What's for dessert?" It can be daunting trying to ensure a healthy diet for our children. So it's no wonder parents often resort to dinner time rules. In our new poll, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 25 percent of families tell their children to eat everything on their plate, and 45 percent report setting restrictions on the types of foods eaten.
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Conservatives and liberals drink different beer
Salon: It was probably inevitable, but it’s striking nonetheless. In a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, Vishal Singh of New York University’s Stern School of Business and his colleagues apply an ever-growing body of research on the psychological traits of liberals and conservatives to their consumer choices. The result? A stark left-right difference when it comes to favoring well-established brands, like Coca-Cola or Tide, over the new and generic products that are trying to compete with them. Read the whole story: Salon
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Relationship Anxiety Is Hard On The Immune System, Study Says
The Huffington Post: Relationship anxiety is known to be tough on a person's mental well-being, but a new study suggests that fear of rejection -- and worry that someone doesn't love you enough -- can also serve as chronic stressors that tax the immune system. In a study of 85 couples who'd been married for an average of 12 years, a team of researchers led by Lisa Jaremka with Ohio State University College of Medicine examined the level of anxiety participants had about close relationships, as well as samples of their blood and saliva. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Replicate This
Pacific Standard: There are few psychological effects better known—or more widely accepted—in academic halls than what is called semantic priming. Show a person a simple stimulus, something as unremarkable as a photograph of a cat. Let some time pass, then ask that same person to list as many words as possible that start with the letter c. This person is more likely not only to come up with the word cat, but to mention catlike animals such as cougars and cheetahs, because he was initially primed with that one little kitty cat. And yet, many of the classic studies that led us to our current understanding of priming have never been replicated.
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How Offices Become Complaint Departments
The New York Times: There is the ideal life, and then there is life as it really exists. We have various ways of expressing discontent over this inevitable gap, and one of the most common is complaining. ... The workplace is no exception. The office is too hot or too cold. Brenda has been making personal calls all day. The boss is making me work on a Saturday. More seriously: that manager is a bully. I think that person’s behavior was unethical. My salary is much lower than everyone else’s. Imagine a workplace with no complaining at all, and a totalitarian government comes to mind.
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Do Music Lessons Make You Smarter?
Scientific American: Practice makes progress, if not perfection, for most things in life. Generally, practicing a skill—be it basketball, chess or the tuba—mostly makes you better at whatever it was you practiced. Even related areas do not benefit much. Doing intensive basketball drills does not usually make a person particularly good at football. Chess experts are not necessarily fabulous at math, and tuba players can’t just put down their tubas and pick up cellos. ... Much of the literature makes the mistake of inferring causation from correlation, and fails to control for confounding variables.
