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DID FACEBOOK HURT PEOPLE’S FEELINGS?
The New Yorker: It’s no secret that social media can affect your mood, making you experience certain feelings based on the information you see and the people you interact with. Those feelings are one of the reasons that people use sites like Facebook or Twitter to begin with. But what if you found out that what you felt was the result of a deliberate manipulation by the social network itself?
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How to Get Over Stage Fright, Jenny Slate Style
New York Magazine: What if you suddenly became intensely afraid of some integral part of your own career? In a recent interview with Fresh Air about her new film Obvious Child, Jenny Slate talked about her sudden-onset stage fright, a potentially career-killing phobia for a stand-up comic and actress. She says her fear, which took hold after she accidentally swore on Saturday Night Live and was subsequently dismissed from the show, lasted two long years.
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This Is Your Brain on Writing
The New York Times: A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning. That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down — or, in this case, lay down — to turn out a piece of fiction. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Learning for Survival? Venom Overrides Other Snake Categories
We deal with the world around us by putting it into categories. We are constantly trying to understand the things we encounter by classifying them: Is this a food I really like, one that I would eat only if I were starving, or something I won’t go near? Is this creepy-crawly thing an insect, a spider, or some other form of arthropod? “Virtually every item can fall into a number of broader or more specific categories, and some levels may be more important to know than others,” write researchers Sharon Noh and colleagues in an article published in Psychological Science.
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How People Perceive ‘Driving Gone Green’
More than 405,000 fully electric vehicles (EVs) are on the road worldwide this year, according to a recent report from a German renewable energy company. That may not seem like many – after all, there are over 1 billion cars in the world. But that number is fully double the number of EVs that were on the road just 2 years ago. Despite what seems to be a burgeoning market for plug-and-play vehicles, misinformation and stereotypes about the cars have proved a major impediment for manufacturers. Researchers from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom recently investigated public perceptions of electric cars by surveying 55 EV drivers.
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Menacer des enfants à travers des histoires est peu efficace (Threatening stories for kids about lying don’t work)
Le Monde: Mentir, c'est mal. Combien de fois a-t-on entendu ce refrain dans notre enfance ? Illustré, souvent, par un conte aux personnages hauts en couleur avec, à la fin, l'inéluctable morale, qui récompense les "gentils" et punit les "méchants". L'objectif : montrer de manière ludique ce qui est bien et ce qui ne l'est pas. Mais, est-ce vraiment efficace ? Pas vraiment, si l'on en croit l'étude publiée dansla revue Psychological Science, relève le Huffington Post. Des chercheurs canadiens des universités de Toronto, de McGill et de Brock se sont demandé quel impact avaient les morales des contes sur le comportement des enfants.
