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Which Comes First — Optimism Or Good Health?
LiveScience: Boosting optimism, defined as the general expectation that the future will be favorable, could provide new ways to improve health, some researchers believe. But scientists remain unsure if optimism precedes health improvements, or vice versa. Julia Boehm, a psychologist at Harvard University, and her colleagues performed what she describes as one of the first studies to investigate a measurable link between psychological and physiological health. To test the correlation, researchers focused on the association between optimism and antioxidant concentration in the body. Antioxidants can help combat disease by neutralizing unstable molecules called free radicals.
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What Causes Obesity? Answer May Affect Your Waistline
LiveScience: People's beliefs about what causes obesity may affect their waistlines, according to a new report. People who named a lack of exercise as the main cause of obesity were more likely to be heavier than those who blamed a poor diet, according to the findings. "Across multiple studies, we found the first evidence that people generally have two different lay theories about what causes obesity, and that these beliefs impact people's actual likelihood of being overweight," wrote the study authors, led by Brent McFerran, a marketing professor and social psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Gloomy Thinking Can Be Contagious
NPR: When students show up at college in the fall, they'll have to deal with new classes, new friends and a new environment. In many cases, they will also have new roommates — and an intriguing new research study suggests this can have important mental health consequences. At the University of Notre Dame, psychologist Gerald Haeffel has recently obtained results from a natural experiment that unfolds every year at the university. In a in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, Haeffel and co-author Jennifer Hames report that roommates can have strong effects — both positive and negative — on one another's mental health. Like many schools, Notre Dame assigns new students their roommates.
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The Perils of Giving Advice
The Wall Street Journal: I know what you should do and here's my advice. How many times have you heard that (and groaned)? Advice giving, especially unsolicited, is tricky. Being on the receiving end can be annoying and make us defensive. But giving advice can be frustrating, as well, particularly when the intended beneficiary of our wisdom makes it clear it isn't welcome—or takes the same recommendations we've been giving for months from someone else. The whole advice issue is typically hardest to navigate with the person we know the best: our spouse or partner. ...
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About Face
Boston Magazine: Forty-six years ago a young San Francisco–based cowboy of a psychologist named Paul Ekman emerged from the jungle with proof of a powerful idea. During the previous couple of years, he had set out trying to prove a theory popularized in the 19th century by Charles Darwin: that people of all ages and races, from all over the world, manifest emotions the same way. Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise.
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People Prefer ‘Carrots’ to ‘Sticks’ When It Comes to Healthcare Incentives
To keep costs low, companies often incentivize healthy lifestyles. Now, new research suggests that how these incentives are framed -- as benefits for healthy-weight people or penalties for overweight people -- makes a big difference. The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that policies that carry higher premiums for overweight individuals are perceived as punishing and stigmatizing. Researcher David Tannenbaum of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles wanted to investigate how framing healthcare incentives might influence people’s attitudes toward the incentives.
