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Is the power of intuition overrated?
The Washington Post: Much has been written in the last 10 years about intuition, especially expert intuition. What’s so fascinating about intuition, of course, is the idea that one’s mind may work on a problem without one being aware of it. Keith Richards put it this way: Somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell’s going on. You might be getting shot at, and you’ll still be ‘Oh! That’s the bridge!’ And there’s nothing you can do; you don’t realize its happening. It’s totally subconscious, unconscious, or whatever. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink was largely devoted to this phenomenon.
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Social-Class Discrimination Contributes to Poorer Health
Discrimination felt by teenagers based on their social class background can contribute to physiological changes associated with poorer health, according to a new study published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Lead author Thomas Fuller-Rowell, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar, says that while the link between poverty and poor health has long been known, this is one of the first studies to consider the impact of class discrimination.
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Phew! The science of the close call
msnbc: With the school year winding down, students and teachers from coast-to-coast are letting out a huge sigh of relief. And whether you're feeling relief because you're retiring this June, found your misplaced cell phone, or got back a negative medical test result, the truth is scientists know surprisingly little about this common feeling. Recently two researchers studied this emotion to help paint a clearer picture of it. But what exactly is relief -- aside from that phew-inducing feeling as if a heavy weight has been lifted off your shoulders?
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We may be better at deciding than we think
The British Psychological Society: A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that people may be better at making decisions than they suspect. The study found individuals tend to be very good at judging how much time to spend making their mind up about certain choices. Andreas Jarvstad of Cardiff University noted previous findings have suggested while adults are usually competent at making smaller decisions, those that require a greater degree of analysis - such as making a big financial selection - pose more problems.
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Embattled Childhood: The Real ‘T’ in ‘PTSD’
The Huffington Post: In 2009 a regiment of Danish soldiers, the Guard Hussars, was deployed for a six-month tour in Afghanistan's arid Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold. They were stationed along with British soldiers -- 270 in all -- at a forward operating base called Armadillo. Although none of the Guard Hussars was killed during the tour of duty, they nevertheless experienced many horrors of battle. A commander was seriously injured by a roadside bomb, and a night patrol ended in a firefight that killed and dismembered several Taliban combatants.
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Wide-Faced Men: Good Guys or Bad?
TIME: Think of the stereotypical tough guy: broad-faced, square-jawed, uber-macho. Research even bears out this convention, linking wider, more masculine faces with characteristics like dishonesty, lack of cooperation and perceived lack of warmth. But a new study challenges the notion that wide-faced men are always the bad guys, finding that in certain situations, they’re actually the most self-sacrificing of the bunch. For the study, researchers from the Perception Lab at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland gave 54 male students money to play a game in groups.
