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Immune Response May Link Social Rejection to Later Health Outcomes
Data from healthy adolescents indicate that recent exposure to targeted rejection activates the molecular signaling pathways that regulate inflammation.
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Testing Can Help Students After All
The Wall Street Journal: In recent years, testing has gained new importance in public schools, much to the chagrin of its critics. But several recent scholarly articles bolster the case that testing can help students learn. Testing has long been known to facilitate later recall. But psychologist Shana K. Carpenter, in surveying the recent scholarly literature, found “robust benefits” from testing on students’ ability to apply their learning in different contexts, which is presumably the point of school.
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Preferences influence choices we make
Asian News International: We come to place more value on the options we chose and less value on the ones we rejected be it choosing between presidential candidates or household objects, researcher say. One way of explaining this effect is through the idea of cognitive dissonance. Making a selection between two options that we feel pretty much the same about creates a sense of dissonance. Re-evaluating the options after we've made our choice may be a way of resolving this dissonance. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in numerous studies, but the studies have only examined preference change shortly after participants make their decision.
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Estimating Risk
BBC: How good at you at estimating risk? Claudia Hammond talks to Wolfgang Gaissmaier about his analysis of the increase in fatal car accidents in the USA following the 9/11 attacks Watch here: BBC
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The Marketplace in Your Brain
The Chronicle of Higher Education: In 2003, amid the coastal greenery of the Winnetu Oceanside Resort, on Martha's Vineyard, a group of about 20 scholars gathered to kick-start a new discipline. They fell, broadly, into two groups: neuroscientists and economists. What they came to talk about was a collaboration between the two fields, which a few researchers had started to call "neuroeconomics." Insights about brain anatomy, combined with economic models of neurons in action, could produce new insights into how people make decisions about money and life. A photo taken during one of those sun-dappled days captures the group posed and smiling around a giant chess set on the resort lawn.
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Being selfish really does make us happy (as long as we can avoid feeling guilty)
The Daily Mail: Being selfish really does make us happier, researchers have found - so long as we can avoid feeling guilty. Although we are taught the benefits of kindness and altruism, it seems we are happiest when simply told to pursue our own self-interest. Researchers found the key to contentment is feeling we have no choice but to be selfish. In contrast, the study, carried out by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, found that those who actively choose a selfish path usually have to battle with guilt.
