-
Diet or Exercise: Which Matters More for Weight Loss?
Women's Health: You know you should exercise and eat healthfully to keep your weight in check. The thing is, research suggests that when people devote time to one healthy habit, they spend less time on the other. So which is more important if you're worried about your waistline: your workout or your diet? Turns out, people who think that diet is the most important factor in weight control tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) than those who believe that exercise is the key, according to six new studies published in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Women's Health
-
Feeling Stressed? Then You May Become More Helpful
TIME: How did your friend get you to babysit her kids for the weekend, or your sister talk you into hosting the next book club meeting? They probably asked when you were anxious about a work project or stressed about making an impending mortgage payment. Stress, however, isn’t traditionally associated with altruism. When self-discipline wanes, such as when you are hurried, hungry or distracted, you are less likely to be helpful to strangers (if you’re late for an appointment, you’re probably not stopping to help the person who just dropped the contents of his briefcase).
-
The Suicide Detective
The New York Times: For reasons that have eluded people forever, many of us seem bent on our own destruction. Recently more human beings have been dying by suicide annually than by murder and warfare combined. Despite the progress made by science, medicine and mental-health care in the 20th century — the sequencing of our genome, the advent of antidepressants, the reconsidering of asylums and lobotomies — nothing has been able to drive down the suicide rate in the general population. ...
-
Is Free Will Just an Illusion?
NPR Science Friday: What would it mean to live in a world in which people are simply mechanical devices responding to natural laws beyond their control, bobbing like corks in a sea of causes? If determinism is true, then the consequences are profound. First, we would need to radically overhaul our conception of moral responsibility. After all, if the choice you make in a given situation is preordained—is the only choice you can make—then what are we to do about blame? Absent the capacity to choose, according to a school of thought called hard determinism, there cannot be any blame. And if no one can be blamed, no one is morally deserving of punishment.
-
According to Kids, the Moral Obligation Against Harm Doesn’t Apply Equally
Research shows that we tend to show an in-group bias, favoring the interests of our own social group over those of another group. But how do we perceive these biases when they occur in other people? Psychological scientists Marjorie Rhodes and Lisa Chalik of New York University hypothesized that children would view other people as morally obligated to help members of their own group, regardless of the circumstances, but they speculated that children might see the obligation as more flexible when it comes to other people’s encounters with an out-group. Their findings are published in the June 2013 issue of Psychological Science.
-
Social Networking in a Graduate Industrial/Organizational Program
While social networks proliferate, insight is lacking about how graduate students, faculty, and administration collaboratively engage such networks. In early 2011, University of Phoenix rolled out what has become the world’s largest, single institution, educational social networking site, PhoenixConnect. The authors examined graduate student, faculty, and administrator contributions and interactions within this university social network. Participants from the graduate program in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology were given qualitative interviews during bimonthly face-to-face classes to investigate the ways participants from different cohorts used social networking.
