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A Time to Kill
Science: A runaway trolley is about to kill five railroad workers. The only way to stop it is to shove a huge man next to you onto the tracks. Would you kill that man to save five? That is one of the standard moral dilemmas that scientists are using to study how people decide between right and wrong. But is it the best example? When was the last time you faced a runaway trolley? To see how people deal with more realistic choices, Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard University, and his undergraduate student Katie Ransohoff, turned to medicine and public health. Read the whole story: Science
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Stereotypical men, women more realistic
Times of India: The psychologists said that it is a very difficult skill to master, but stereotypical male and female are almost always accurate in their predictions of who wants to date them. In Psychological Science, psychology professor Mitja Back and his colleagues report that they studied several hundred participants in a German speed-dating group. They asked each participant to take a psychological test aimed at assessing how "sociosexually unrestricted" the men were, and how "agreeable" the women were. Read more: Times of India
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Monkeys Might Be More Logical Than We Think
You see a big cat nursing a kitten, and you assume Cat A is Cat B’s mother. Then you see a bird dropping worms in a smaller bird’s mouth. Different content, different context, but same relationship—you conclude that Big Bird is Little Bird’s mom. This is an analogy—a relationship between relationships. What is behind this ability—and is it uniquely human? “There is a long debate as to whether this ability is dependent on language,” says Center for Research in Cognitive Neurosciences and University of Provence cognitive psychologist Joël Fagot. “It has been shown in apes who have been language trained.” But can animals perceive analogies without language?
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Put your stress on vacation
Los Angeles Times: Got stress? If you answered no, hooray for you! (And, by the way, what planet are you from?) But if you answered yes (like any normal member of the human race), you're likely heartened by the arrival of vacation season. Just the ticket for a little stress-reduction. And that can have some big payoffs. It can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system and help you live longer. It may even make you smarter. "A vacation is not a luxury," says Jens Pruessner, an associate professor in the departments of psychology, psychiatry, neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal.
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Plan Your Way to Less Stress, More Happiness
TIME: A recent survey by psychologist and self-help author Robert Epstein found that 25% of our happiness hinges on how well we're able to manage stress. The next logical question is, of course, how best can we reduce our stress? Epstein's data, which he presented last month at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Los Angeles, was intended to help answer that question. It involved 3,000 participants in the U.S. and 29 other countries, who responded to an online questionnaire.
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Violent Video Games Linked to Increased Aggression
MSN Health: Violent video games trigger aggression among those who play them, according to a new University of Missouri study. Such players showed more hostility because their brains had become less responsive, or desensitized, to violence -- a response that the researchers linked to increased aggression. "From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence," study co-author Bruce Bartholow, an associate professor of psychology at UM College of Arts and Sciences, said in a university news release. Read more: MSN Health
