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Thinking won’t help you resist temptation
Yahoo: Temptation comes in many guises -- for a dieter, it's a sweet treat; for an alcoholic, a drink; for a married man, an attractive woman. How to defeat the impulse to gratify desire and stick to your long-term goals of slimness, sobriety, or fidelity? Don't stop and think. Thinking may not help. That is the surprising conclusion of a new study conducted by Loran Nordgren and Eileen Chou at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the journal Psychological Science reported. Nordgren and Chou wanted to make sense of two contradictory bodies of literature.
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Toughest Exam Question: What Is the Best Way to Study?
The Wall Street Journal: Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers. Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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How rude: When politeness backfires
Canada.com: Dr. Aidan Feeney has a few thoughts about politeness. Essentially, he thinks it has the ability to cost lives. "The more serious the situation, the more likely you are to be polite and the more room there is for confusion," says Feeney, a professor at the school of psychology at Queen's University, Belfast, and co-author of a new paper entitled "The Risk of Polite Misunderstanding," published last week by the Association of Psychological Science.
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Mastering Chess: Talent Or Practice?
Science 2.0: Why do some people, chess players or musicians, practice less but attain more? The common belief is that practice is necessary to achieve mastery in chess, but it's not enough. There has to be something else that sets apart people who get really good at chess, just like in music. A study published in Psychological Science last year found that musicians need a lot of practice, but researchers identified one additional factor: musicians who are better at sight-reading have better working memory, the ability to keep relevant pieces of information active in your mind. For chess, that additional factor has not yet been pinned down. One possibility is intelligence.
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Laughing may help ease blood pressure, boost mood and enrich health in other ways
The Washington Post: Whenever I took a tumble or scraped my knee as a child, my mother typically assessed the situation and then promptly tickled me, counseling, “Laughter is the best medicine.” This trick remains remarkably effective with my own boys and, to this day, YouTube videos of laughing babies or cats playing with printers still have the power to make me feel a bit better when I’m under the weather. But while giggling is certainly a great distraction when you’re hurt or feeling low, I can’t help but wonder whether the old adage is true: Can laughter really have a positive impact on health?
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How your Facebook profile picture predicts future happiness
National Post: You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but a new study suggests you can judge future happiness by a Facebook photo. Reporting in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers find that smile intensity from a single profile picture can predict how satisfied a person will be with their life nearly four years later. The insight to future well-being replicates a link revealed in earlier research with formal portraits, sparking renewed interest in the information coded in human faces.
