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Study links synaesthesia with coloured fridge magnets
Wired UK: A study of people with colour-grapheme synaesthesia -- where written forms are associated with particular colours -- has found that the pairings of colours and letters may be linked to playing with children's coloured magnetic letters. The research was conducted by Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer of Stanford University's psychology department and focused on eleven synaesthetes with strikingly similar letter-colour pairings which appeared to correspond with the letter-colour pairings of typical toy magnetic letters. Read the whole story: Wired UK
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Life in the Red
The New York Times: The belt-tightening was the easy part. Cancel the cable. Skip the air conditioners. Ration the cellphone, unplug the wireless Internet, cook rice and beans — done, and done. The larger problem for LaKeisha Tuggle, 33, who had lost her public relations job, was cash flow: After her unemployment insurance and savings ran dry, there was none. So she did some creative financing, juggling loans, credit lines, tax refunds and educational grants, to stay afloat — until a Sunday in September of 2011, when it looked as if the jig was up. She awoke to a foreclosure notice on her front door that announced her home would be auctioned in a week. “One week?” said Ms.
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Psychology Plays Key Role in Women’s Salary Negotiations
Yahoo: Closing the gender gap between men and women's salaries could depend on better negotiation tactics, new research finds. The study, by researchers at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon universities, shows that women can successfully negotiate higher salaries. But unlike men, they have to pay attention to the approach they use in order to avoid social backlash. "The anticipation of social backlash or pay discrimination is taxing for women and undermining of their human potential," said the study authors, Harvard's Hannah Riley Bowles and Carnegie Mellon's Linda Babcock. Read the whole story: Yahoo
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Contemplation: A Healthy State of Mind
The Huffington Post: Most dietitians will tell us that the first step in achieving a healthy body weight is buying a good bathroom scale. The second is using it, regularly. Knowing our weight keeps us honest, and this basic bit of information is a key motivator for the nutrition and exercise changes needed to stay fit over the long haul. And it's simple and effortless. Except that it's not. Many people do not have a scale, and what's more, do not want one. Or if they have one, they never use it. There are many explanations for such avoidance. Some people hold on to a bygone image of themselves, believing that they are still fit and healthy. They don't want this cherished delusion shattered.
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Bad news, economic data may lead to high-calorie food choices, eating more, study suggests
National Post: If you find yourself going to the fridge for an extra helping these days, you may want to consider switching the channel from watching the news, or at least hitting the mute button during certain stories. A new study by the University of Miami says we tend to eat more when we hear about bad things happening in the world, whether it’s economic, political or other harsh news being relayed. When seemingly apocalyptic forecasts about the financial climate appear in the news, people reach for high calorie foods to help keep them satisfied for longer, the study notes.
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The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices
The Atlantic: Daniel McFadden is an economist. But his new paper, "The New Science of Pleasure," shows the many ways economics fails to explain how we make decisions -- and what it can learn from psychology, anthropology, biology, and neurology. The old economic theory of consumers says that "people should relish choice." And we do. Shopping can be fun, democracy is better than its alternatives, and a diverse and fully stocked grocery store ice cream freezer is quite nearly the closest thing to heaven on earth. But other fields of science tell a more complicated story.
