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El estrés cambia la forma en la que se toman decisiones
ABC Salud: El estrés cambia la forma en la que se toman decisiones, alterando la manera en la que las personas sopesan riesgos y beneficios. Así lo apunta un estudio de llevado a cabo por un equipo de investigadores de la Universidad de California del Sur (EE.UU.), cuyos resultados, publicados en el último número de Current Directions in Psychological Science, revelan que el estrés hace que la gente se centre más en lo positivo.
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The Wages of Eco-Angst
The New York Times: Even today, when media warnings about the latest health or safety risk are commonplace, the incessant drumbeat of reported environmental hazards can be truly alarming, leaving us worried, like the followers of Chicken Little, that the sky really is falling. But while plenty of these threats are serious, some of the most frightening eco-bogeymen are not nearly the dangers that many presume. Nuclear radiation, for example, still tangled in many minds with images of atomic blasts, mutant Godzillas and rampant cancer, is nowhere near as harmful to human health as most believe.
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A Gesture of Authority: What’s the Point?
The Huffington Post: My very first classroom teacher had a long wooden pointer, and she wielded it like a weapon. At least that's my gauzy recollection. Many of the lessons were written on the blackboard, and she would use her pointer to direct our attention to this or that bit of information. She was an absolute and unquestioned authority in my small world, and her ubiquitous pointer served to reinforce that perception. Pointing remains a basic tool of instruction, both in the classroom and beyond. Elementary school teachers still use pointers, though these days most of them are plastic and colorful, with clownish hands attached. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Broken Hearts Are Truly Painful, Research Shows
The Huffington Post: If you've ever gone through extreme grief, a rough divorce or a break-up, you'll know this to be true: that aching feeling in your heart truly hurts, and now research backs it up. New research, published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, examines a number of studies to find that social pain and rejection are quite real. One study showed that brain activity is similar in people when they talk about both moments of social rejection and physical pain. "We were sitting next to each other and noticed how similar the two brain images looked," study researcher Naomi Eisenberger of the University of Califiornia-Los Angeles said in a statement.
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Girls beat boys at arithmetic because they have better language skills
The Daily Mail: While boys generally do better than girls in science and maths, some studies have found that girls do better in arithmetic – and this is down to girls’ superior verbal skills, according to new research. Scientists at Beijing Normal University did a series of tests on young children that showed that girls did indeed outperform boys at arithmetic and they believe it’s because it involves lots of verbal processing. The researchers did a series of tests with children ages 8 to 11 at 12 primary schools in and around Beijing. Read the whole story:
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Stress Changes How People Make Decisions
Trying to make a big decision while you’re also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that. Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome. It’s a bit surprising that stress makes people focus on the way things could go right, says Mara Mather of the University of Southern California, who cowrote the new review paper with Nichole R. Lighthall. “This is sort of not what people would think right off the bat,” Mather says.
