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Boost Intelligence by Focusing on Growth
Scientific American: Is intelligence innate, or can you boost it with effort? The way you answer that question may determine how well you learn. Those who think smarts are malleable are more likely to bounce back from their mistakes and make fewer errors in the future, according to a study published last October in Psychological Science. Researchers at Michigan State University asked 25 undergraduate students to participate in a simple, repetitive computer task: they had to press a button whenever the letters that appeared on the screen conformed to a particular pattern. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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How Symptoms Are Presented Online May Affect Whether We Think We Have The Disease
The Huffington Post: If you're one of those people who obsessively Googles your symptoms when you're feeling sick, you should read this. A new study in the journal Psychological Science shows that we're more likely to think we have the sickness or disease if a number of our symptoms are listed consecutively on a website. "People irrationally infer more meanings from a 'streak,'" study researcher Virginia Kwan, a psychologist at Arizona State University, said in a statement.
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Children whose minds wander ‘have sharper brains’
The Telegraph: A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally. Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering dictated sentences. During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering. At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions.
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Head Games: How Visual Illusions Improve Sports Performance
TIME: It’s that time of year again. March Madness is around the corner and athletes — and inspired fans — are aiming to improve their performance on the court. It turns out, the secret to game-time success may lie in players’ imaginations. A new study finds that athletes are more likely to score when they think their target — be it a basket or golf hole — is larger than it really is. Researchers from Purdue University studied 36 college students putting into a golf hole up a ramp. Using a projector, the researchers created an optical illusion that showed a ring of circles around the golf hole which altered its perceived size.
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Newer states spawn unique names
The Columbian: When Washougal residents Kyle and Dianna Curtis had their first daughter, Brooklynn, they wanted to give her a unique name that would epitomize her personality. “I wanted a unique but not a farfetched, ridiculous name,” Dianna Curtis said. Nationwide, names have become more unconventional in the past 20 years in tandem with an increasing value placed on individualism, according to a 2010 study by researchers from San Diego State University and the University of Georgia. “In recent times, … the culture emphasizes uniqueness more than past eras or eastern states,” said Jean Twenge, psychology professor at San Diego State University, who co-authored the study.
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The science of touch
Men's Health: Your skin is two square metres of intimate sensory data. And haptics, the branch of psychology that interprets this information, has recently made some interesting discoveries: according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, just being touched by a member of the opposite sex is enough to turn off your neural response to stress. Read the whole story: Men's Health
