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Emergency Plane Landing Yields PTSD Clues
LiveScience: Interviews with the survivors of a 2001 emergency plane landing are helping researchers understand how certain memories may increase the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new study finds. The study's lead researcher has firsthand knowledge of the calamity. Margaret McKinnon, an associate professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, was on her honeymoon when Air Transat Flight 236, en route from Toronto to Lisbon, Portugal, ran out of fuel over the Atlantic. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Tooth Fairy feels the pinch after overspending
USA Today: The Tooth Fairy is holding her purse strings a bit tighter. She left 8% less this year - or an average of $3.40 for every lost tooth she finds under a pillow - down from $3.70 in 2013, according to a survey from Visa out Thursday. Still, she's leaving more than she did in 2012 before tooth inflation rose 23% from 2012 to 2013. "She's had her wings clipped a little bit," says Jason Alderman, Visa's vice president of global financial education. "Even though it is down, this is the first real decline we've seen even during the recession because Tooth Fairy inflation has far exceeded the rate of traditional inflation." ...
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Is Racism Just a Form of Stupidity?
The Huffington Post: I think that a lot of us are shying away from an obvious truth: that the kind of blatant racial prejudice we are witnessing in Ferguson, Missouri, has everything to do with stupidity. I'm talking about low intelligence, lack of mental ability, cognitive rigidity. Racists may be a lot of other things -- hateful, insecure -- but let's not sugar-coat what most fair-minded thinkers believe in their hearts: A person of intelligence cannot embrace such authoritarian and racist views. Intelligence is a scientific concept, something scientists can measure, and have for a long time.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Practice Does Not Make Perfect: No Causal Effect of Music Practice on Music Ability Miriam A. Mosing, Guy Madison, Nancy L. Pedersen, Ralf Kuja-Halkola, and Fredrik Ullén How essential is practice to achieving an expert level of performance? To answer this question, the authors asked monozygotic and dizygotic twins who play an instrument or sing how often they had practiced during four different age intervals (0-5 years, 6-11 years, 12-17 years, and 18 years till the time of measurement). The twins' music ability was assessed using a test of pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination.
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The Power of Two: Why Sharing Is Better
My wife and I watch a lot of movies at home. It’s one of our favorite pastimes. I also watch a fair number of movies by myself, if my wife is out of town or busy with something else. Both of these activities are enjoyable, and I like the occasional solitude. But I enjoy the movies more when we watch them together, and I’ve often wondered why. It’s not that we talk during the movie, or communicate in any way really. We’re mostly silent, but we’re side-by-side, and that in itself seems to enhance the experience of watching a movie. Psychological scientists, it turns out, have noticed this phenomenon, too, and find it intriguing.
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When It Comes To Driving, Most People Think Their Skills are Above Average
If you ask someone to rate their driving skills on a one to 10 scale, there’s a good chance they’ll give themselves an above-average rating like a 7. Psychological scientists Michael M. Roy of Elizabethtown College and Michael J. Liersch of New York University found that although people may rate themselves as above average, they don’t think others would quite agree. Across four experiments, Roy and Liersch found that people often believed that others would rate them as a worse driver (about 10% worse) than they rated themselves. Because there is no standard definition for “good driving,” people tend to use their own unique, individual definitions.
