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Freshman Funk: Is Harmful Thinking Contagious?
I know very few people who would describe first semester, freshman year of college, as a time of unqualified joy. I was certainly ready to leave home, but even so it was a disruptive time. I was disconnected from my family and close friends for the first time and, even more difficult, thrown into a dormitory full of strangers—young men from unfamiliar places with diverse experiences and values. This social disruption was not an altogether bad thing in the long run. I knew nothing about anything when I arrived on campus, and these new classmates, including my roommate, opened my mind to all sorts of ideas I might not have encountered otherwise. The intellectual life was contagious.
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Selling Kids On Veggies When Rules Like ‘Clean Your Plate’ Fail
NPR: If you're a parent, you've probably heard remarks like this during dinner: "I don't like milk! My toast is burnt! I hate vegetables! I took a bite already! What's for dessert?" It can be daunting trying to ensure a healthy diet for our children. So it's no wonder parents often resort to dinner time rules. In our new poll, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 25 percent of families tell their children to eat everything on their plate, and 45 percent report setting restrictions on the types of foods eaten.
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Conservatives and liberals drink different beer
Salon: It was probably inevitable, but it’s striking nonetheless. In a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, Vishal Singh of New York University’s Stern School of Business and his colleagues apply an ever-growing body of research on the psychological traits of liberals and conservatives to their consumer choices. The result? A stark left-right difference when it comes to favoring well-established brands, like Coca-Cola or Tide, over the new and generic products that are trying to compete with them. Read the whole story: Salon
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Relationship Anxiety Is Hard On The Immune System, Study Says
The Huffington Post: Relationship anxiety is known to be tough on a person's mental well-being, but a new study suggests that fear of rejection -- and worry that someone doesn't love you enough -- can also serve as chronic stressors that tax the immune system. In a study of 85 couples who'd been married for an average of 12 years, a team of researchers led by Lisa Jaremka with Ohio State University College of Medicine examined the level of anxiety participants had about close relationships, as well as samples of their blood and saliva. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Replicate This
Pacific Standard: There are few psychological effects better known—or more widely accepted—in academic halls than what is called semantic priming. Show a person a simple stimulus, something as unremarkable as a photograph of a cat. Let some time pass, then ask that same person to list as many words as possible that start with the letter c. This person is more likely not only to come up with the word cat, but to mention catlike animals such as cougars and cheetahs, because he was initially primed with that one little kitty cat. And yet, many of the classic studies that led us to our current understanding of priming have never been replicated.
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Hurting Someone Else Can Hurt You Just As Much
Experiencing ostracism -- being deliberately ignored or excluded -- hurts, but ostracizing someone else could hurt just as much, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Humans are social animals and they typically avoid causing harm to others when they can. But past experiments -- and real-life events -- suggest that people are willing to inflict harm in order to comply with authorities. Graduate student Nicole Legate, along with her advisor, Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester, and colleagues, hypothesized that complying with these kinds of directives might have psychological costs for the perpetrators.
