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Modern Lessons From Arranged Marriages
The New York Times: WHETHER arranged marriages produce loving, respectful relationships is a question almost as old as the institution of marriage itself. In an era when 40 to 50 percent of all American marriages end in divorce, some marriage experts are asking whether arranged marriages produce better relationships in the long run than do typical American marriages, in which people find each other on their own and romance is the foundation. Experts also ask whether there are lessons in how arranged marriages evolve that can be applied to nonarranged marriages in the United States.
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Researchers: Get some sleep, and your partner will thank you
Los Angeles Times: It's no secret that poor sleep gets in the way of all kinds of good things in life. People who drive on too little sleep -- and there are a lot of us -- are more likely to be in accidents that result in injuries than people who've had enough rest. When we haven't slept well, we make lousy food choices and have trouble metabolizing our food. Staying up too late studying actually hurts high-schoolers' academic performance. Among the younger set, slight decreases in sleep make kids more likely to act out. A team of faux astronauts suffered a variety of sleep disturbances over the course of a 17-month simulated Mars mission.
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Popular study strategies called ineffective — report
The Washington Post: Researchers who evaluated 10 learning techniques believed to improve student achievement found that five of them — including highlighting or underlining, are not very effective. The report, called “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques,” says that one reason that ineffective study habits form is because there is too much research for educators to evaluate to figure out how to advise their students. Published in the January issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, the report was written by John Dunlosky and Katherine A. Rawson of Kent State University, Elizabeth J. Marsh of Duke University, Mitchell J.
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Conflicting Cultural Identities May Foster Political Radicalism
New research suggests that dual-identity immigrants -- first-generation immigrants and their descendants who identify with both their cultural minority group and the society they now live in -- may be more prone to political radicalism if they perceive their two cultural identities to be incompatible. The new research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychological scientist Bernd Simon from Kiel University in Germany and colleagues hypothesized that perceived incompatibility between the two cultural identities may pave the way for controversial or even destructive forms of politicization, such as political radicalism.
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The (Really Scary) Invisible Gorilla
The Invisible Gorilla is part of the popular culture nowadays, thanks largely to a widely-read 2010 book of that title. In that book, authors and cognitive psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris popularized a phenomenon of human perception—known in the jargon as “inattentional blindness”—which they had demonstrated in a study some years before. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times some basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed even to notice the beast.
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The Economy Could Also Be Making You Fat
Motherboard: Many of us know the feeling: We get depressed or anxious and the first thing we want to do is pig out. As noted on Motherboard a few weeks ago with regard to sugary drinks (and drinks with synthetic sugar), reaching for something sweet and feeling depressed may be something of a vicious cycle. But scary, depressing news about the economy, specifically, could make us more inclined to grab a Big Mac. This, according to a new study published in Psychological Science: People consume more high-calorie foods when they’re hit with messages that undermine their sense of economic well-being—nearly 40 percent more. Read the whole story: Motherboard
