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From Halloween to Horror Movies, Why We Love to Be Afraid
ABC News: On any gloomy day, Michele Sinesky asks her husband to find a good monster movie on television -- "The Thing" or "The Tingler." "You name it, I've seen it twice," said the 63-year-old grandmother of four from Charlottesville, Va. "For one thing, it's an old-time memory back to my childhood when we kids would tell each other spooky stories late at night at sleepovers -- the sense of someone saying 'boo' to you." "But I also get an adrenaline rush when the monster jumps out at me," said Sinesky.
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Protective Behavioral Strategies as a Mediator and Moderator in Alcohol-Related Outcomes
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Gabrielle D'Lima from Old Dominion University present her research on “Protective Behavioral Strategies as a Mediator and Moderator in Alcohol-Related Outcomes.” With coauthors Matthew R. Pearson (Old Dominion University) andMichelle L. Kelley (Old Dominion University), Gabrielle D'Lima investigated the role of protective behavioral strategies as a possible mediator and moderator of the relationship between self-regulation and alcohol-related outcomes in first-year undergraduates. Self-regulation, in general, has been found to predict alcohol consequences.
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Should You Quit Taking Vitamins?
Yahoo! Health: I'm a big fan of vitamins. And judging by the size of the vitamin and supplement industry—$20 billion in annual sales, a quarter of that in multivitamins—so are you. Pop one pill and you get a day’s worth of nutrients. What’s not to love? Well, there is this: A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that taking multivitamins and other supplements may actually shorten your life. Uh-oh. Researchers in the study collected information from nearly 40,000 women (but say the findings apply to men too) several times over 22 years. They asked about all sorts of health issues, including vitamin and supplement use.
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Fedeltà, orgasmo, partner i luoghi comuni sfatati dalla scienza
La Repubblica: Il cantautore Cesare Cremonini non è più l'unico a credere che gli uomini e le donne siano uguali: a fargli eco sono anche gli scienziati. Negli ultimi 20 anni, molti studi hanno dimostrato che, quando si tratta di sesso, maschi e femmine pensano e agiscono in modo simile. I 'miti' del diverso approccio dei generi (lui più interessato al sesso, lei all'amore e così via) sono dunque destinato ad essere soppiantati dalla schiettezza della ricerca che, una volta tanto, vede i dati provenienti da più laboratori andar tutti nella stessa direzione.
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Why Does That Conductor Look So Creepy?
Several movies have tried and failed to generate lifelike animations of humans. For example, the lifeless faces in Polar Express made people uncomfortable because they tried to emulate life but didn’t get it quite right. “There’s something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home,” says Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College. Humans can see faces in anything—the moon, a piece of toast, two dots and a line for a nose—but we are much more discriminating when it comes to deciding what’s alive and what’s not.
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Is Violence Declining? APS Fellow Steven Pinker Says “Yes”
Violence is as an inherent part of human society. So if you looked at the number of violent deaths from prehistory to the present day, you would expect to see a pretty steady trend, right? Not so, says APS Fellow Steven Pinker. “Violence has been in decline for thousands of years,” he says. “We may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” Pinker, who is a psychological scientist from Harvard University, collected his research on the subject in a new book called The Better Angels of Our Nature. He discussed the book in a recent lecture at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Washington DC.
