Mind Over Matter
As obsessed as teens are with clothes and cars, materialism actually peaks in the preteen years, The Journal of Consumer Research reports. Why? It's closely tied to self-esteem, which hits a nadir around then. On the bright side, all it takes is a little ego boost to make kids forget about bling.
Missing sleep might make you forgetful—permanently. New data show that people with chronic insomnia have smaller hippocampi—parts of the brain important for memory formation. Researchers speculate it's the loss of sleep that actually changes the brain structure. (I think that's what they said.)
Breakfast of Champions
An unhealthy diet puts your body and mind out of whack, but one little feast can't hurt, right? Wrong. Researchers found that eating McDonald's for breakfast instead of a low-fat meal can stress you out, spiking your heart rate and blood pressure in response to pain or public speaking two hours later.
Battle of the Wills
Instead of abandoning your 10-speed, shift your focus from building delts to building strength of character. A new study finds that when people think of a task as a test of willpower, they're more likely to resist temptation and stick with it.
79%
Seventy nine percent of Americans think a woman can lead a happy life while remaining single. Only 67% think a man can.
Playing the Part
In virtual environments like Second Life, changing your body can change your personality, presto zappo. Given attractive avatars, people immediately become more intimate with others online, standing closer and revealing more about themselves. While steering taller avatars, they drive harder bargains during negotiations. Researcher Nick Yee suggests the changes may persist even after signing off.
Blinded by Science
If you're trying to explain an aspect of human behavior and coming up short, referencing the brain makes the explanation far more satisfying to laypeople, even if the jargon is irrelevant. Want to distract someone's frontal lobe neural circuitry from your faulty logic? Throw in a few technical terms.
Ovulatory hormones actually amplify lesbian lust.
Ovulation increases flirtation, regardless of the object of desire. Although hormones elevate sex drive during peak fertility, the instinct to breed takes different forms in lesbians than in straight women. Heterosexual women pay more attention to male faces during ovulation, but a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology shows that when lesbians are ovulating, they're faster to identify female faces—but not male ones. In other words, women are wired to look for a partner when it's time to make babies, but sometimes they search using cues that have nothing to do with conception. Researcher Lucy Johnston says that while the data shed no light on the origins of female homosexuality, they do show that "reproductive forces cannot fully explain the pattern of female sexual behavior."
Scheming: Soft Targets
If you're itching for a raise, it makes sense to swoop in when your boss' home team is winning. But according to new research, when we want something from other people, we strongly prefer to try to take advantage of their generosity when they don't know we're aware of their good mood, keeping our scheming hidden. In a wagering task, people were much more likely to offer their partner a raw deal if they knew their partner had just watched a funny video. That is, unless the partner knew the video viewing was common knowledge. Researcher Teck Ho at Berkeley notices similar shrewdness in his own home: "When my teenage daughter wants to go out to a party, she'll make sure I'm in a happy mood—by checking with my wife first."
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