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Contemplation: A Healthy State of Mind
The Huffington Post: Most dietitians will tell us that the first step in achieving a healthy body weight is buying a good bathroom scale. The second is using it, regularly. Knowing our weight keeps us honest, and this basic bit of information is a key motivator for the nutrition and exercise changes needed to stay fit over the long haul. And it's simple and effortless. Except that it's not. Many people do not have a scale, and what's more, do not want one. Or if they have one, they never use it. There are many explanations for such avoidance. Some people hold on to a bygone image of themselves, believing that they are still fit and healthy. They don't want this cherished delusion shattered.
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Bad news, economic data may lead to high-calorie food choices, eating more, study suggests
National Post: If you find yourself going to the fridge for an extra helping these days, you may want to consider switching the channel from watching the news, or at least hitting the mute button during certain stories. A new study by the University of Miami says we tend to eat more when we hear about bad things happening in the world, whether it’s economic, political or other harsh news being relayed. When seemingly apocalyptic forecasts about the financial climate appear in the news, people reach for high calorie foods to help keep them satisfied for longer, the study notes.
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The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices
The Atlantic: Daniel McFadden is an economist. But his new paper, "The New Science of Pleasure," shows the many ways economics fails to explain how we make decisions -- and what it can learn from psychology, anthropology, biology, and neurology. The old economic theory of consumers says that "people should relish choice." And we do. Shopping can be fun, democracy is better than its alternatives, and a diverse and fully stocked grocery store ice cream freezer is quite nearly the closest thing to heaven on earth. But other fields of science tell a more complicated story.
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Music, Multivitamins And Other Modern Intelligence Myths
NPR: Playing Mozart to young children will make them smarter, right? Probably not. When it comes to media hype and intuitions about intelligence and early childhood, some skepticism is in order. A paper published just this month by John Protzko, Joshua Aronson and Clancy Blair at NYU reviews dozens of studies on a topic likely to be of interest to parents, educators, and policy-makers alike: what, if anything, one can do in the first five years of life to raise a child's intelligence. The authors combed the research literature to identify studies of children's intelligence that met their strict criteria for inclusion.
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How Disasters and Trauma Can Affect Children’s Empathy
TIME: Do children become more kind and empathetic after a disaster— or does the experience make them more focus more on self-preservation? The first study to examine the question in an experimental way shows that children’s reactions may depend on their age. ... “Our study demonstrates that a natural disaster affects children’s pro-social tendencies, and [does so] differently depending on their age,” says study co-author Jean Decety of the University of Chicago.
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In Hard Times, an Instinct to Pack on Pounds
The Wall Street Journal: When times are tough, people make like bears getting ready to hibernate: they eat more and prefer higher calorie foods. That’s the implication of a new paper reporting that, in an experiment involving M&Ms, people faced with messages about hard times ate way more than people surrounded by neutral messages. The paper actually describes three experiments exploring how humans adjust their eating when unconsciously “primed” with words such as adversity, struggle and survival. Researchers found that the perception of hard times prompts people to live more for the moment, let tomorrow take care of itself, and stoke up against an uncertain future.
