Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational

Identity in question: 1.1 What is identity? - OpenLearn - Open University - DD100_2 This unit is about questions of identity. Identity itself seems to be about a question, ‘who am I?’ We are going to focus on three key questions in this section: How are identities formed?How much control do we have in shaping our own identities? First, we need to think a bit more about what we mean by identity. If identity provides us with the means of answering the question ‘who am I?’ This example also illustrates the importance of marking oneself as having the same identity as one group of people and a different one from others. How do we know which people are the same as us? In this sense, although as individuals we have to take up identities actively, those identities are necessarily the product of the society in which we live and our relationship with others. However, how I see myself and how others see me do not always fit. The subject, ‘I’ or ‘we’ in the identity equation, involves some element of choice, however limited.

Hunters of Myths: Why Our Brains Love Origins | Literally Psyched A stylized apple with a bite taken out of its right side: chances are, even if you don’t own a single Apple product, you would still recognize the ubiquitous logo. But have you ever paused to consider the symbol’s origin? The logo's rainbow represents color bars on a screen. Image credit: Marcin Wichary, Creative Commons. Perhaps it’s Adam and Eve and the quest for knowledge, the apple a symbol of new discovery, with subtle undertones of lust for ever-growing innovation. Or maybe, Isaac Newton, sitting under an apple tree when the apocryphal falling fruit prompted his theory of gravity. Two years after Turing was tried for indecency for a romantic liaison with a 19-year-old male—the exact same charge, incidentally, that was levied against his compatriot Oscar Wilde in 1895, over half a century earlier—and then forced to undergo hormonal therapy to temper his “indecent urges” (the effective equivalent of male castration), he committed suicide—by biting a cyanide-laced apple. How boring.

Language and Emotion – Insights from Psychological Science - Association for Psychological Science News We use language every day to express our emotions, but can this language actually affect what and how we feel? Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the ways in which the interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being. Putting Feelings into Words Can Help Us Cope with Scary Situations Katharina Kircanski and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles investigated whether verbalizing a current emotional experience, even when that experience is negative, might be an effective method for treating for people with spider phobias. In an exposure therapy study, participants were split into different experimental groups and they were instructed to approach a spider over several consecutive days. Published online August 16, 2012 in Psychological Science Lead author: Katharina Kircanski — katharina.kircanski@gmail.com Unlocking Past Emotion: The Verbs We Use Can Affect Mood and Happiness

Making Sense of the World, Several Senses at a Time Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. In reality, however, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. We can become aware of this collaboration under special circumstances. In some cases, a sense may covertly influence the one we think is dominant. When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear. Our senses must also regularly meet and greet in the brain to provide accurate impressions of the world. Seeing What You Hear We can usually differentiate the sights we see and the sounds we hear. Beep Baseball Blind baseball seems almost an oxymoron. Calling What You See Bats and whales, among other animals, emit sounds into their surroundings—not to communicate with other bats and whales—but to “see” what is around them. Do You Have Synesthesia?

Unlocking past emotion: verb use affects mood and happiness. Emotion Selectively Distorts Our Recollections On September 11, 2001, Elizabeth A. Phelps stepped outside her apartment in lower Manhattan and noticed a man staring toward the World Trade Center, about two miles away. Looking up, “I just saw this big, burning hole,” Phelps recalls. The man told her that he had just seen a large airplane crash into one of the skyscrapers. Thinking it was a horrible accident, Phelps started walking to work, a few blocks away, for a 9 A.M. telephone meeting. Like Phelps, many Americans have searing memories of that day. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content

S0960-9822(09)01824-7?_returnURL= Figure 1 Box-Plot Diagram of the Values tnorm(F0max) and tnorm(Imax) Distribution of all observed melody and intensity contours in German and French newborns' crying, displayed as box plots of the 25th to 75th percentile, with the solid vertical line inside each box representing the median and the bars outside each box representing the minimum and maximum values. The dashed vertical line represents a symmetric melody arc. The data indicate a preference for either rising (French group) or falling (German group) melodies. Figure 2 Time Waveform and Narrow-Band Spectrograms of a Typical French Cry and a Typical German Cry Figure 3 Diagrammed Cry Melody as Time Function of Fundamental Frequency F0 with Time-Normalized Duration Human fetuses are able to memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language [1–3] .

Vanishing Languages Tuvan The Compassion of Khoj Özeeri One morning in early fall Andrei Mongush and his parents began preparations for supper, selecting a black-faced, fat-tailed sheep from their flock and rolling it onto its back on a tarp outside their livestock paddock. The Mongush family’s home is on the Siberian taiga, at the edge of the endless steppes, just over the horizon from Kyzyl, the capital of the Republic of Tuva, in the Russian Federation. They live near the geographic center of Asia, but linguistically and personally, the family inhabits a borderland, the frontier between progress and tradition. Tuvans are historically nomadic herders, moving their aal—an encampment of yurts—and their sheep and cows and reindeer from pasture to pasture as the seasons progress. Tuvan is one of the many small languages of the world. Who can blame them? Yet Tuvan is robust relative to its frailest counterparts, some of which are down to a thousand speakers, or a mere handful, or even one individual. Aka Seri

Why We Help: The Evolution of Cooperation Last april, as reactors at japan's fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant were melting down following a lethal earthquake and tsunami, a maintenance worker in his 20s was among those who volunteered to reenter the plant to try to help bring things back under control. He knew the air was poisoned and expected the choice would keep him from ever marrying or having children for fear of burdening them with health consequences. Yet he still walked back through Fukushima's gates into the plant's radiation-infused air and got to work—for no more compensation than his usual modest wages. Although they may not always play out on such an epic scale, examples of selfless behavior abound in nature. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content

The Limits of Intelligence Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish Nobel-winning biologist who mapped the neural anatomy of insects in the decades before World War I, likened the minute circuitry of their vision-processing neurons to an exquisite pocket watch. He likened that of mammals, by comparison, to a hollow-chested grandfather clock. Indeed, it is humbling to think that a honeybee, with its milligram-size brain, can perform tasks such as navigating mazes and landscapes on a par with mammals. A honeybee may be limited by having comparatively few neurons, but it surely seems to squeeze everything it can out of them. At the other extreme, an elephant, with its five-million-fold larger brain, suffers the inefficiencies of a sprawling Mesopotamian empire. We humans may not occupy the dimensional extremes of elephants or honeybees, but what few people realize is that the laws of physics place tough constraints on our mental faculties as well. Sign up for Scientific American’s free newsletters.