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Queen bee in the office: who gets stung?
Financial Times: Female bosses get a bad rap. There's even a word for them. No, not that word. I am talking about the term "queen bee". The queen bee is the female boss who strives to protect her power at all costs. She distances herself from other women at the office, and rather than promote her junior counterparts, she refuses to help them rise through the ranks. But according to a new study by Belle Derks of Leiden University in the Netherlands, such behaviour may not necessarily be her fault. Rather, it is the product of an inherently sexist work environment.
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Need to remember something? Think of the dentist or dead cats
MSNBC: If you want to remember new information, looking at photographs that stir up negative emotions may do the trick, suggests new research from Psychological Science. Yeah, we know that sounds counterintuitive -- but it appears to work. When study participants viewed color images of a dead cat, a pointed gun, or a person getting a dental exam -- pictures that evoke negative feelings -- it actually improved their recall of recently learned information. In this case, 40 college students were asked to bone up on 100 vocabulary words in Swahili along with their English translations.
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Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?
The New York Times: A BEAUTIFUL woman lowers her eyes demurely beneath a hat. In an earlier era, her gaze might have signaled a mysterious allure. But this is a 2003 advertisement for Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (S.S.R.I.) approved by the F.D.A. to treat social anxiety disorder. “Is she just shy? Or is it Social Anxiety Disorder?” reads the caption, suggesting that the young woman is not alluring at all. She is sick. But is she? It is possible that the lovely young woman has a life-wrecking form of social anxiety. There are people too afraid of disapproval to venture out for a job interview, a date or even a meal in public.
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Lung cancer victim’s deathbed image sends potent message
Los Angeles Times: For American smokers, her portrait is a glimpse of a future frightening to ponder and, for U.S. health officials, perhaps too powerful to foist on the public: an unsparing photograph of a person scarcely recognizable as a woman, her body wasted by cancer, her hair gone, her blue eyes fixed in a thousand-mile stare. She was Barb Tarbox, and she died on May 18, 2003, of lung cancer at the age of 42. From October 2002, two months after she was diagnosed, to the moment of her death, the Edmonton, Canada, homemaker set about making her ordeal a lesson to others about the dangers of smoking.
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Is He Gay? Ovulating Women Can Tell
TIME Healthland: Ovulation is a really useful biological function. Not only does it facilitate pregnancy — though sperm are in no short supply, the ephemeral egg appears just once a month — but new research finds that it also helps a woman select potential partners by enhancing her "gaydar." All this complex sexual decision-making is going on behind the scenes, according to a study published online this week in the journal Psychological Science that found that straight women at their peak period of fertility are far more accurate than non-ovulaters at sussing out who's gay and who's not just by looking at a man's face.
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Scary New Cigarette Labels Not Based in Psychology
Science: There's no question that the nine new graphic cigarette warning labels designed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which will be on all cigarette packages sold in the United States starting in September 2012, are ghastly. But has rampant gruesome imagery in shows like House emasculated their effectiveness? And will these pictures really convince a jaded smoker to quit or prevent a rebellious teenager from starting?
