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Daydreaming Boosts Creativity, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post: Permission to daydream, granted. A new study in the journal Psychological Science shows that allowing your mind to wander might actually be good for your creative prowess. Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, found an association between daydreaming and creative problem-solving. Their study involved having participants first conduct an "unusual use task" -- where they had to try to come up with as many weird ways to use an object as they could.
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Carbohydrates don’t boost self-control
United Press International: U.S. researchers say sugar does not appear to have a metabolic boost for self-control. Psychological scientist Daniel C. Molden of Northwestern University in Chicago and colleagues said many had thought self-control relied on carbohydrate metabolism -- people deplete their carbohydrate stores as they exert self-control, making it more difficult to exert self-control until the stores are built up again. Read the whole story: United Press International
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Romney, Obama and the New Culture War over Fairness
TIME: Remember when the culture war was about obscenity in rap music, protecting the flag from match-wielding protesters and spanking in schools? Not all so-called cultural issues have faded away — gay marriage and abortion are still quite divisive — but after the 2008 financial collapse and the rise of the libertarian-influenced Tea Party, both armies in the American culture war shifted their crack brigades over to the so-called economic issues of taxes and entitlement spending. The front line in this new culture war is fairness. Both sides claim to own the territory, yet they draw the map of American morality differently.
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Understanding the Zombie Teen’s Body Clock
The Wall Street Journal: Many parents know the scene: The groggy, sleep-deprived teenager stumbles through breakfast and falls asleep over afternoon homework, only to spring to life, wide-eyed and alert, at 10 p.m.—just as Mom and Dad are nodding off. Fortunately for parents, science has gotten more sophisticated at explaining why, starting at puberty, a teen's internal sleep-wake clock seems to go off the rails. Researchers are also connecting the dots between the resulting sleep loss and behavior long chalked up to just "being a teenager." This includes more risk-taking, less self-control, a drop in school performance and a rise in the incidence of depression.
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Elizabeth Warren, Scott Brown and the Myth of Race
TIME: If, as David Axelrod once said, “Campaigns are like an MRI for the soul,” then what do we see when we peer into the campaigns of Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown and his challenger, liberal icon Elizabeth Warren? We see a classic culture clash: town vs. gown, the Red Sox vs. the Head of the Charles Regatta, a small-town guy with an iconic pickup truck vs. a Harvard professor who’s a national star. Brown’s latest ad attacks Warren as if she has been caught in a lie about her racial background: Warren claims to be part Cherokee and Delaware Indian. In her response ad, she says she never benefited professionally from her heritage, a claim backed up by officials who hired her.
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The more money we have, the fewer problems we see
The Washington Post: “Money doesn’t buy happiness” is a cliche for a reason. The Nobel laureate psychologist/economist Daniel Kahneman and Princeton economist Angus Deaton have found that “emotional well-being” (that is, what emotions people report themselves as having felt the previous day) maxes out at around $75,000 of annual income, even though peoples’ evaluations of how well their lives are going rise indefinitely with income. “We conclude,” Kahneman and Deaton write, “that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness.” But this kind of analysis can be problematic when it’s used to compare whole societies, rather than individual people.
