-
Scientists have figured out what makes Dr. Seuss so silly
The Washington Post: Chris Westbury was trying to get work done, and everyone around him kept laughing. As part of a study on aphasia, a speech and language disorder, the University of Alberta psychology professor was running a study in which test subjects were shown strings of letters and asked to distinguish real words from made-up ones. But every time the (non) word “snunkoople” cropped up, the subjects would collapse with mirth. ... Many psychologists believe that laughter and amusement evolved to signal that a surprise is not a threat.
-
New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Price of Perspective Taking: Child Depressive Symptoms Interact With Parental Empathy to Predict Immune Functioning in Parents Erika M. Manczak, Devika Basu, and Edith Chen People vary in the amount of empathy -- the tendency to affectively experience and adopt the perspective of others -- they experience. Empathy is generally considered to be a positive and desirable trait, but are there circumstances in which empathy is harmful?
-
Get Up, Stand Up! How to Get People to Quit Sitting
If you work a typical office job, you might be spending more than 10 hours a day sitting down. Across numerous studies, extensive sitting has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even an early death. People are becoming increasingly aware of the health risks associated with sitting, but with many employees desk-bound, how do you convince people to get up and get moving at work? According to a new meta-analysis, interventions that specifically targeted sitting, rather than just getting people to exercise more often, were the most effective at getting people to be less sedentary at work.
-
Inside the Psychologist’s Studio: Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential scientific scholars. His work has spanned visual cognition, children’s language development, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of
-
How Loneliness Wears on the Body
The Atlantic: Every Monday during the summer, some of the residents of Lyme, New Hampshire, gather up fruits and vegetables from their gardens to donate to Veggie Cares, a program that distributes local food to people living alone. Volunteers collect, sort, and package the produce, then head out in separate directions to deliver the food to some Lyme's most vulnerable, isolated residents. While the stated goal of the program is to provide people with healthy food, Veggie Cares volunteers also deliver companionship.
-
The Surprising Benefits of Sarcasm
Scientific American: “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” wrote that connoisseur of wit, Oscar Wilde. Whether sarcasm is a sign of intelligence or not, communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away from this particular form of expression. The reason is simple: sarcasm expresses the poisonous sting of contempt, hurting others and harming relationships. As a form of communication, sarcasm takes on the debt of conflict. ... Consider the following example, which comes from a conversation one of my co-authors on the research (Adam Galinsky, of Columbia) had a few weeks before getting married.
