Category: ideas

Two Harvard psychologists are studying “whether honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in the first place (an automatic process).”

“Guilt in its many varieties – Puritan, Catholic, Jewish, etc. – has often gotten a bad rap, but [in studies,] psychologists keep finding evidence of its usefulness. Too little guilt clearly has a downside – most obviously in sociopaths who feel no remorse, but also in kindergartners who smack other children and snatch their toys.”

“Brain regions key to cognition are smaller in older people who are obese compared with their leaner peers, making their brains look up to 16 years older than their true age. As brain shrinkage is linked to dementia, this adds weight to the suspicion that piling on the pounds may up a person’s risk of the brain condition.”

“The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. … An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.”

“British scientists are to begin work on a revolutionary project to record three-dimensional models of world heritage sites so that they can be re-created if they fall victim to climate change, natural disaster, war or terrorism.”

“Psychologists and economists have found that while money does matter to your sense of happiness, it doesn’t matter that much. Beyond the point at which people have enough to comfortably feed, clothe, and house themselves, having more money – even a lot more money – makes them only a little bit happier.”

A physicist “went through Götterdämmerung note-by-note, lyric-by-lyric, recording which notes were paired with which vowel sounds. In the early hours of the next morning he wrote a computer program to determine with statistical certainty whether Wagner had in fact used a vowel-pitch matching technique. Looking at the program’s first results, he was amazed. There was a clear relationship.”

“If you’re lost in the woods and you feel like you’re walking in circles, you probably are. Without landmarks to guide us, people really do go around and around, found a new study.”

“Women: do you have a man? If you do, better beware. Chances are that some lone female has her eye on him. A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton.”

“‘I’m not convinced it’s as bad as the experts make out… It’s everyone else’s fault… Even if I turn down my thermostat, it will make no difference.’ The list of reasons for not acting to combat global warming goes on and on. This month, an American Psychological Association (APA) task force released a report highlighting these and other psychological barriers standing in the way of action. But don’t despair. The report also points to strategies that could be used to convince us to play our part.”