-
Fruit, Not Fries: Lunchroom Makeovers Nudge Kids Toward Better Choices
NPR: Gone are the days of serving up tater tots and French toast sticks to students. Here are the days of carrot sticks and quinoa. New nutritional guidelines, announced in 2012, require public school lunchrooms to offer more whole grains, low-fat milk and fewer starchy sides like french fries. But short of stationing grandmothers in every cafeteria, how do you ensure that students actually eat the fruits and veggies they're being offered? A minor lunchroom makeover could make a big difference, says Andrew Hanks, a behavioral economist at Cornell University.
-
Tactics to Spark Creativity
The Wall Street Journal: Why is it that some people rack their brains for new ideas, only to come up empty—while others seem to shake them almost effortlessly out of their sleeves? Whether creativity is an innate gift or a cognitive process that anyone can jump-start is a question so intriguing that researchers keep studying it from different angles and discovering new and surprising techniques. ... But personality isn't the only path to inspiration, researchers say. Walking away from a problem to do simple, routine tasks, and letting the mind wander in the process, can spark creative new connections or approaches to solving dilemmas, says a 2012 study in Psychological Science.
-
Does nature play a role in forming prejudices?
The Boston Globe: Anyone who’s ever been to a playground or read “Lord of the Flies” knows that children don’t have to be taught how to pick on unpopular peers. But a troubling new study in the journal Psychological Science offers evidence that the impulse to hurt those who are different shows up even in children too young to speak. In a study involving 200 babies, researchers at Yale and the University of British Columbia first demonstrated that babies were far more likely to favor a rabbit puppet that preferred the same food they did. Then they broadened the experiment by introducing two dog puppets — a “helper” dog that was nice to the rabbits, and a “harmer” dog that was mean.
-
The ‘New’ Benefits Of Mindfulness: Improved Memory, Focus, And GRE Scores
Forbes: Paying attention may be one of the most fundamental and important cognitive abilities we have. It’s too bad, then, that many of us are so bad at it. It’s not only our outer distractions that get the better of us – email, texts, Twitter – but even worse can be the internal ones: Mind-wandering is a major problem for a lot of people, and there are few effective solutions for it. A wandering mind can lead to a host of negative effects, from reduced productivity to rumination to cycles of negative thoughts. And like a wandering mind at work, a wandering mind at school – or, worse, during major tests like the GREs – can be a particular problem.
-
Reframing Stress: Stage Fright Can Be Your Friend
Scientists find that simply encouraging people to reframe the signs of stress before public speaking was a surprisingly effective way of handling stage fright.
-
Is the Placebo Effect Dangerous?
The Huffington Post: Physician and medical gadfly Ben Goldacre is well known for his relentless crusade to keep medical researchers and drug makers honest -- and improve healing in the process. His recent and popular TEDTalk focuses on a particular form of research misconduct that strikes at the core of all evidence-based treatment -- the failure to publish negative findings. This publication "bias" is not subtle or inadvertent in most cases; indeed the opposite. The deliberate non-reporting of results unfavorable to a drug's reputation is often motivated by greed, and can be lethal to patients.
