Psychology
Playing natural sounds such as flowing water in offices could boosts worker moods and improve cognitive abilities in addition to providing speech privacy, according to a new study.
An increasing number of modern open-plan offices employ sound masking systems that raise the background sound of a room so that speech is rendered unintelligible beyond a certain distance and distractions are less annoying. Sound masking systems are custom designed for each office space by consultants and are typically installed as speaker arrays discretely tucked away in the ceiling. For the past 40 years, the…
A new survey finds that 87 percent of Americans look at the Nutrition Facts panel on packaged foods and beverages and 56 percent actively seek out nutritional information and guidelines.
67 percent favor groceries with fewer and simpler ingredients, while roughly the same percentage take nutritional content statements, ingredient-free statements, and statements about health benefits into consideration when buying packaged foods and beverages.
As is well known, food consumers who are buying for those reasons are vocal on social media, focus groups, consumer surveys, and even petitions.…
Many of the people who visit me in my therapy practice spend time talking about work. How much work there is, how they never seem to be able to get it all done, how many hours they spend at work, how tired they are all the time and how fearful they are about losing their jobs. They’ve read articles telling them how they can improve their work/life balance. They’ve delegated and relegated, meditated and ruminated.
Women in particular come in suffering the effects of overwork, losing out financially in the longer hours marathon, or perhaps more frighteningly, sacrificing their work to help…
If you think of your 'sense of self', do you locate it in your heart or your brain?
It can tell people a lot about your decision-making process. Obviously, advertising is one area. Messages targeted at people with independent self-construals (your head tells you buying this car is the right decision because it has good value) will work better for those people than messages targeted at people with interdependent self-construals (Your heart tells you buying this car is the right decision because it has the highest safety ratings for families.)
For a new paper, eight…
Objections to automated driving seem a little silly, since millions of lives are lost in car accidents and human error is estimated to cause more than 90% of them.
It may just be fear of the unknown, the same precautionary principle that makes people worry about having a Twitter login or be concerned about vaccines or GMOs.
Regardless of the reasons for concern, it is a giant error to assume that data and reason will win out, as science has learned painfully about energy, medicine, food and pollution. Trust may instead be established in less direct ways and a recent paper argues that a…
A psychological analysis of novice assassins has delved into how hitmen bury their feelings after a successful attack.
Hired killers don't deal with people, they are businessmen and they are doing a job, no different than a soldier in the military.
North London teenager Santre Sanchez Gayle offered a classic example of detachment, shooting Gulistan Subasi in March 2010, as she opened the door for a paltry sum of £200. The 15-year-old, later sentenced to a minimum of 20 years for the crime, allowed no time for his victim to be personalized before leaving the scene calmly in a taxi. That…
What makes us happy? Philosophers, psychologists and scientists have long pondered that question.
Psychologists believe they may have a solution that satisfies everyone in flow theory, a model that better preserves the approach to individual distinctiveness by considering the mental experience as a process that might foster the evolution or the involution of an individual through his daily experiences.
The term, originally coined by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, describes the experiences of intrinsically motivated people, those who are engaged in activities worth doing just for the sake of…
Meat eaters who justify their eating habits feel less guilty and are more tolerant of social inequality, say a group of authors led by psychologist Dr. Jared Piazza of Lancaster University.
Omnivores also rationalize, say the team. They have labeled the most common justifications for not adapting a vegetarian lifestyle as "the 4Ns - that meat consumption is Natural, Normal Necessary and Nice.
Natural - “Humans are natural carnivores”Necessary - “Meat provides essential nutrients”Normal - “I was raised eating meat”Nice - “It’s delicious”
The group asked students and adults in the United…
Other-orientated perfectionists are different than the kind who set a difficult standard for themselves; the other-oriented kind sometimes that can veer into narcissism, antisocial behavior and an aggressive sense of humor against others. They care little about social norms and do not readily fit into the bigger social picture.
Perfectionism is a personality trait that is characterized by the setting of extremely high standards and being overly critical of oneself or others. Psychologists recognize three types of perfectionism, each with different beliefs, attitudes, motivations and behaviors…
Mosaic |
The theme of fetishism and disability came up in ribald and raunchy conversation during the Talking Dirty session at the Unlimited festival held at London’s Southbank Centre in September 2014.
A central theme of the festival, which celebrates disability arts in all its forms, was the importance of sexuality. During that particular session, a number of prominent disabled activists talked about the importance of speaking out about and celebrating sexuality. One panel member praised the beauty of another participant’s particularly well-shaped feet, saying she had been “given permission” to…