What You Can't Say

The Top 10 Psychology Studies of 2010 The end of 2010 fast approaches, and I'm thrilled to have been asked by the editors of Psychology Today to write about the Top 10 psychology studies of the year. I've focused on studies that I personally feel stand out, not only as examples of great science, but even more importantly, as examples of how the science of psychology can improve our lives. Each study has a clear "take home" message, offering the reader an insight or a simple strategy they can use to reach their goals , strengthen their relationships, make better decisions, or become happier. 1) How to Break Bad Habits If you are trying to stop smoking , swearing, or chewing your nails, you have probably tried the strategy of distracting yourself - taking your mind off whatever it is you are trying not to do - to break the habit. That's because habit-behaviors happen automatically - often, without our awareness. J. 2) How to Make Everything Seem Easier J. 3) How To Manage Your Time Better M. 4) How to Be Happier J.

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' - The Chronicle Review By Daniel J. Solove When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they're not worried. "I've got nothing to hide," they declare. The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. The argument is not of recent vintage. I encountered the nothing-to-hide argument so frequently in news interviews, discussions, and the like that I decided to probe the issue. My response is "So do you have curtains?" On the surface, it seems easy to dismiss the nothing-to-hide argument. One can usually think of something that even the most open person would want to hide. But such responses attack the nothing-to-hide argument only in its most extreme form, which isn't particularly strong. To evaluate the nothing-to-hide argument, we should begin by looking at how its adherents understand privacy. Privacy, in other words, involves so many things that it is impossible to reduce them all to one simple idea. Daniel J.

Virtue Ethics 1. Preliminaries In the West, virtue ethics’ founding fathers are Plato and Aristotle, and in the East it can be traced back to Mencius and Confucius. It persisted as the dominant approach in Western moral philosophy until at least the Enlightenment, suffered a momentary eclipse during the nineteenth century, but re-emerged in Anglo-American philosophy in the late 1950s. It was heralded by Anscombe’s famous article “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Anscombe 1958) which crystallized an increasing dissatisfaction with the forms of deontology and utilitarianism then prevailing. Its re-emergence had an invigorating effect on the other two approaches, many of whose proponents then began to address these topics in the terms of their favoured theory. Although modern virtue ethics does not have to take a “neo-Aristotelian” or eudaimonist form (see section 2), almost any modern version still shows that its roots are in ancient Greek philosophy by the employment of three concepts derived from it. 2. 3.

The real reason why the Spotify model is broken By Sharky Laguana on March 15th, 2015 Streaming services, most notably Spotify, use what could be called a pari-mutuel royalty system: All the money collected goes into a big pool, Spotify takes its 30 percent off the top, and whatever is left is distributed to artists based on their share of overall plays. Spotify explains how it all works right here. It sounds perfectly fair and reasonable: If an artist wants to make more money, all they need to do is get more plays. But there’s a major disconnect in this economic model that has not been discussed widely: Spotify doesn’t make money from plays. So how is that a problem? Let’s say I am a huge fan of death metal. $3 goes to Spotify. Roughly $0.007 will go to Butchers of the Final Frontier. But hey, wait a second. Spotify: “What $7?” That other $7. Spotify: “We paid it out in royalties. Don’t be cute with me. Spotify: “Look! How could this be? Spotify doesn’t make money from plays. OK, so what’s the solution? This can change. They should.

Yogurt diet leads to 'swaggering' mice with larger testicles By Muriel KaneFriday, May 4, 2012 18:14 EDT Researchers who recently undertook a study with mice in hopes of confirming earlier reports that eating yogurt can help prevent age-related weight gain have discovered a number of unexpected side-effects in their rodent subjects. First, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists realized that the yogurt-eating mice had shinier, silkier, and thicker coats than the non-yogurt-eating control mice. Then they noticed that the male mice were walking with a “mouse swagger,” which turned out to be due to testicles that were 5% heavier than those of mice fed a standard mouse diet and a full 15% heavier than those of mice forced to live on high-fat, low-nutrient junk food. And finally they conducted mating experiments and found that yogurt-eating males “inseminated their partners faster and produced more offspring,” while yogurt-eating females gave birth to larger litters and were more successful in raising them to the age of weaning. Muriel Kane

How to Build Self-Discipline Discipline is freedom. You may disagree with this statement, and if you do you are certainly not alone. For many people discipline is a dirty word that is equated with the absence of freedom. In fact the opposite is true. As Stephen R. Self-discipline involves acting according to what you think instead of how you feel in the moment. Work on an idea or project after the initial rush of enthusiasm has faded awayGo to the gym when all you want to do is lie on the couch and watch TVWake early to work on yourselfSay “no” when tempted to break your dietOnly check your email a few of times per day at particular times In the past self-discipline has been a weakness of mine, and as a result today I find myself lacking the ability to do a number of things which I would like – e.g. to play the guitar. If you struggle with self-discipline, the good news is that it can be developed. 1. Discipline means behaving according to what you have decided is best, regardless of how you feel in the moment. 2.

The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films | Science Not Fiction I love Pixar. Who doesn’t? The stories are magnificently crafted, the characters are rich, hilarious, and unique, and the images are lovingly rendered. Popular culture is often dismissed as empty “popcorn” fare. Buried within that constant and complex goodness is a hidden message. Now, this is not your standard “Disney movies hide double-entendres and sex imagery in every film” hidden message. What if I told you they were preparing us for the future? Before we begin, I ask you to watch the video below. People love these films. To understand Pixar films, one must first to go back to Disney before Toy Story was released – to be precise, The Lion King. The Lion King gives us a clean slate. The relationship between humans and the non-human characters is critical to understanding Pixar’s movies. The third rule is that at least one main character is an intelligent being that isn’t a human. You can see where I’m going here. Non-humans are sentient beings.

Introduction to Social Influence, Persuasion, Compliance & Propaganda This portion of the Working Psychology website offers a brief introduction to a big topic: social influence, the modern, scientific study of persuasion, compliance, propaganda, "brainwashing," and the ethics that surround these issues. Although these topics aren't always simple (it is, after all, science), I've done my best to make this introduction interesting. Since Aristotle recorded his principles of persuasion in Rhetoric, humans have attempted to define and refine the principles of successful influence. Persuasion has been studied as an art for most of human history. The comparatively young science of social influence, however, can trace its roots to the second world war, when a social psychologist named Carl Hovland was contracted by the U.S. Social scientists attempt to support any assertion with facts. Want a few examples of how social influence works in the real world before you continue? Copyright © 2002 by Kelton Rhoads, Ph.D.

Airline chief seeks to help ease takeover fears Aer Lingus Chief Executive Stephen Kavanagh has moved to allay union fears about the takeover of IAG regarding job losses, future terms and conditions, and outsourcing. While conciliatory and reassuring in tone, the letter to SIPTU Divisional Organiser Owen Reidy makes clear that Aer Lingus is not conceding its ability to react to future competitive pressures as required. However SIPTU sources have said that the assurances do not go far enough. In his letter, Mr Kavanagh said that job losses that would arise if the IAG sale proceeds would be significantly outnumbered by the jobs that would be created within a short period of time. He said the employment growth would arise in areas where the airline's preference is for direct employment, and pledged that where job losses arise, the company would maximise the number of voluntary redundancies and redeployments. This has been a key demand of unions.

five_horrifying_serial_killers_youve_probably_never_heard_of Serial killers are the real-life monsters that we disguise as horror movie villains. Bundy, Dahmer, and Manson are names that are as recognizable as Freddy, Jason, and Michael. They are horrifyingly fascinating because, in the movies, motives aren't questioned; it's just a fun, scary time, and the threat ends when the lights come on. The "Bloody Benders" In the late 1870s in Kansas, a startling number of missing persons were reported to the authorities. Allegedly German immigrants, the Bender family consisted of parents John and Kate, and adult children John Jr. and Kate. H.H. Much like Capone, a simple white-collar crime brought H.H. During the course of their investigation, authorities discovered Holmes's "Murder Castle" - a three story building that held retail space on the bottom, and rooms for rent above. Holmes's killing spree at the Murder Castle only lasted about a year. Andrei Chikatilo Chikatilo was a sexual deviant, but surprisingly, suffered no abuse in his childhood.

Why harmony pleases the brain - physics-math - 19 September 2011 The key to pleasant music may be that it pleases our neurons. A new model suggests that harmonious musical intervals trigger a rhythmically consistent firing pattern in certain auditory neurons, and that sweet sounds carry more information than harsh ones. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have known that two tones whose frequencies were related by a simple ratio like 2:1 (an octave) or 3:2 (a perfect fifth) produce the most pleasing, or consonant, musical intervals. "We have found that the reason for this difference is somewhere at the level of neurons," says Yuriy Ushakov at the N. Ushakov and colleagues considered a simple mathematical model of the way sound travels from the ear to the brain. However, the signals from the sensory neurons arrive at the same time if the tone is consonant, and so the interneuron still fires just once, then waits until it "recharges" before it fires again. That makes the model experimentally testable. More From New Scientist Surprise!

How to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. (article) THERE IS A CIRCULAR, self-feeding loop in many aspects of human nature, and you can use them to your advantage — or disadvantage. In many of these self-feeding loops, your thoughts play a major role. For example, a person with indigestion (caused by stress) notices a pain in his stomach, and then worries that maybe something is seriously wrong with him. His thoughts have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A few years ago, I was talking with a client named Stacy. The problem with this kind of thing is that it has a tendency to keep going down because as you feel worse, your point of view becomes more and more narrow and biased toward the negative, which makes you feel even worse, which narrows your point of view even more and makes you see more danger, misery or threat in your world, which brings you down even more, etc. When I was in high school, I had to take a speech class. "I'm really afraid to give speeches," I said. I knew he was right. He went on, "Just treat this the same way.

Crowd psychology Crowd psychology, also known as mob psychology, is a branch of social psychology. Social psychologists have developed several theories for explaining the ways in which the psychology of the crowd differs from and interacts with that of the individuals within it. Major theorists in crowd psychology include Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud and Steve Reicher. This field relates to the behaviors and thought processes of both the individual crowd members and the crowd as an entity.[1] Crowd behavior is heavily influenced by the loss of responsibility of the individual and the impression of universality of behavior, both of which increase with the size of the crowd.[2][3] Origins[edit] The psychological study of crowd phenomena began in the decades just prior to 1900 as European culture was imbued with thoughts of the fin de siècle. The first debate in crowd psychology began in Rome at the first International Congress of Criminal Anthropology on 16 November 1885. See also[edit]