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Bad news, economic data may lead to high-calorie food choices, eating more, study suggests
National Post: If you find yourself going to the fridge for an extra helping these days, you may want to consider switching the channel from watching the news, or at least hitting the mute button during certain stories. A new study by the University of Miami says we tend to eat more when we hear about bad things happening in the world, whether it’s economic, political or other harsh news being relayed. When seemingly apocalyptic forecasts about the financial climate appear in the news, people reach for high calorie foods to help keep them satisfied for longer, the study notes.
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The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices
The Atlantic: Daniel McFadden is an economist. But his new paper, "The New Science of Pleasure," shows the many ways economics fails to explain how we make decisions -- and what it can learn from psychology, anthropology, biology, and neurology. The old economic theory of consumers says that "people should relish choice." And we do. Shopping can be fun, democracy is better than its alternatives, and a diverse and fully stocked grocery store ice cream freezer is quite nearly the closest thing to heaven on earth. But other fields of science tell a more complicated story.
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4th Summer Institute in Human Ethology
4th Summer Institute in Human Ethology Sponsored by ISHE and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI August 6-9, 2013 www.ISHE.org Details: The International Society for Human Ethology will hold its 4th Biennial Summer Institute on Human Ethology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, USA, on 6-9 August, 2013. ISHE Summer Institutes are specifically designed to be more student friendly than many other scientific conferences, and include generous financial support for student participants (such as free registration and lodging stipends for students who are first author presenters of accepted proposals).
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Music, Multivitamins And Other Modern Intelligence Myths
NPR: Playing Mozart to young children will make them smarter, right? Probably not. When it comes to media hype and intuitions about intelligence and early childhood, some skepticism is in order. A paper published just this month by John Protzko, Joshua Aronson and Clancy Blair at NYU reviews dozens of studies on a topic likely to be of interest to parents, educators, and policy-makers alike: what, if anything, one can do in the first five years of life to raise a child's intelligence. The authors combed the research literature to identify studies of children's intelligence that met their strict criteria for inclusion.
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How Disasters and Trauma Can Affect Children’s Empathy
TIME: Do children become more kind and empathetic after a disaster— or does the experience make them more focus more on self-preservation? The first study to examine the question in an experimental way shows that children’s reactions may depend on their age. ... “Our study demonstrates that a natural disaster affects children’s pro-social tendencies, and [does so] differently depending on their age,” says study co-author Jean Decety of the University of Chicago.
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In Hard Times, an Instinct to Pack on Pounds
The Wall Street Journal: When times are tough, people make like bears getting ready to hibernate: they eat more and prefer higher calorie foods. That’s the implication of a new paper reporting that, in an experiment involving M&Ms, people faced with messages about hard times ate way more than people surrounded by neutral messages. The paper actually describes three experiments exploring how humans adjust their eating when unconsciously “primed” with words such as adversity, struggle and survival. Researchers found that the perception of hard times prompts people to live more for the moment, let tomorrow take care of itself, and stoke up against an uncertain future.
