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How Americans get wiser with age… but the Japanese are as wise as they’ll ever be by 25
The Daily Mail: It is commonly thought that age brings wisdom. And this is largely true, it seems – unless you are Japanese. In which case, by the time you are 25, you are likely to be just as wise as your elders, an astonishing new study reveals. Americans, however, are more conventional and develop deep understanding over time, according to research by the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. In one of the tests, designed to measure five crucial aspects of reasoning, U.S. citizens’ scores improved by 22 per cent over 50 years. Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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Q & A With Psychological Scientist Stephan Lewandowsky (Part 1)
Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Western Australia. His research investigates memory and decision making, focusing on how people update information in memory. We asked Stephan Lewandowsky questions based on his recent paper on misinformation, published in the December issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The report, "Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing", is co-authored by Ullrich Ecker of the University of Western Australia, Colleen Seifert and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan, and John Cook of the University of Queensland.
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Craving an Ice-Cream Fix
The New York Times: The notion that food can be addictive has been debated for some time and largely rejected by both nutrition and addiction researchers. But this spring, the secretary of health, Kathleen Sebelius, said that for some, obesity is “an addiction like smoking.” One month earlier, Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, gave a lecture at Rockefeller University, making the case that food and drug addictions have much in common, particularly in the way that both disrupt the parts of the brain involved in pleasure and self-control.
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Study: Oxytocin (‘The Hormone of Love’) Also Makes Us Conformists
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: Oxytocin, which you may also know as "the hormone of love," is the driving force behind sociability, trust, and generosity. It enables everything from mother-child bonding to orgasms, and it's one of the main things that sociopaths lack. The catch is that it strictly promotes in-group love -- and so it can't be used to kumbaya away cultural and political conflicts. Since oxytocin causes favoritism, might it also contribute to group conformity? METHODOLOGY: You can get oxytocin release by shaking someone's hand or hugging a loved one.
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Failure Is an Option
Parents Magazine: Whenever Helena Bogosian takes her daughters, Margot, 5, and Nina, 4, out to eat, she asks if they can have the same toy in their kids' meal so neither feels slighted. But one time the girls got different things because the restaurant had run out of the plastic grasshoppers they both wanted. Margot started crying hysterically, so the Tenafly, New Jersey, mom drove to four more franchises in fruitless pursuit of matching toys. By the time she gave up, it was dark, the kids were fast asleep in their car seats, and she felt foolish. "I learned that avoiding a child's disappointment can be harder than helping her deal with it," she says.
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Study: More women winemakers are making names for themselves
The Washington Post: In 1978, the first vintage that Cathy Corison made wine, she could count on one hand the number of women she knew of doing the same kind of work in the cellars of the Napa Valley. Without using all her fingers. Nearly 35 years later, Corison needs a lot more fingers. Winemaking remains primarily a man’s world, but research by Santa Clara University professors Lucia Albino Gilbert and John Gilbert has found that nearly 10 percent of California wineries now have women as the main or lead winemaker. Their second finding: Women winemakers tend to be more highly acclaimed than their male counterparts. Why?
