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The Biological Response to Beauty and Ugliness in Art [Excerpt]
Scientific American: Our attraction to faces, and particularly to eyes, appears to be innately determined. Infants as well as adults prefer to look at eyes rather than other features of a person’s face, and both infants and adults are sensitive to gaze. The direction of a person’s gaze is very important in our processing of the emotions displayed by that person’s face, because the brain combines information from gaze with information from facial expressions.
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Major League Baseball Copes With Climate Change
The Huffington Post: On June 30, Washington Nationals ace Stephen Strasburg had his shortest outing of the season, lasting only three innings against the Atlanta Braves at Turner Field. What knocked him out of the box? Record-breaking heat. The 24-year-old All Star pitcher had prepared by drinking copious amounts of water the night before. He retreated to the air-conditioned clubhouse between innings. No matter. The temperature at 4 p.m. game time that Saturday afternoon was 104 degrees, the official high that day was 106 -- the hottest in Atlanta's history -- and by the fourth inning the temperature on the field was around 120. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Health gem
The Irish Times: If you do one thing this week . . . take a wakeful rest after learning Could taking a wakeful rest after learning help memory? Experiments where people were asked to remember prose suggest that it could. In the recent study, published in Psychological Science, adult participants were told short stories. That was followed by 10 minutes where some rested awake but undistracted, while others played a non-verbal spot-the-difference game. Those who had the wakeful rest remembered more of the story’s information a week later. Read the whole story: The Irish Times
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Language and Emotion – Insights from Psychological Science
We use language every day to express our emotions, but can this language actually affect what and how we feel? Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the ways in which the interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being. Putting Feelings into Words Can Help Us Cope with Scary Situations Katharina Kircanski and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles investigated whether verbalizing a current emotional experience, even when that experience is negative, might be an effective method for treating for people with spider phobias.
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Flu psychology: Who risks what for whom?
My local pharmacy is offering flu shots. The sign grabbed my attention the other day, because it was a sweltering, muggy day, and it seemed way too early to think about winter flu bugs. But a little digging proved me wrong. The vaccine takes a couple weeks to click in, and seasonal flu bugs can arrive as early as October. So I did the arithmetic, and I’m lining up to get poked. I’ve gotten flu shots for years, though I’m not in any high-risk group. It just seems prudent to me. And the fact is, public health officials count on people who are at low or moderate risk to get inoculated anyway.
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How Urban Parks Enhance Your Brain
The Atlantic: A couple weeks ago the folks at Cracked told readers that "living in a city makes you dumber." There are a number of flaws here — beyond the obvious one of getting your science news from Cracked — but the research at the center of the claim has some relevance to cities worth considering nonetheless. What it tells us is not so much a story about the hazards of city living as it is about the benefits of city parks. The original study at issue here, which I'm familiar with from earlier work, was published back in 2008 in Psychological Science.
