Does your name dictate your life choices?
What’s in a name? Letters. And psychologists have posited that the letters—particularly the first letter of our names—can influence decisions, including whom we marry and where we move. The effect is called implicit egotism.
Gender stereotypes could push women away from entrepreneurship
Gupta, who has devoted much of his research career to entrepreneurship, finds that gender stereotypes can discourage women from starting their own businesses, while gender-neutral messages prove most appealing to them.
Mobile polling breaks down barriers to voting for seniors in long-term care facilities
For seniors, voting can be difficult: standing with a walker or cane in the voting booth, struggling to read the tiny print on the ballot or trying to punch the tiny button to vote for the intended. Despite the desire to vote, the typical voting process leaves many seniors disenfranchised, particularly for residents of long term care facilities.
Why Henry Higgins could tell his barrow girl from his fair lady
When Professor Henry Higgins instructed Eliza Doolittle that it was “Ay not I, O not Ow, Don’t say ‘Rine,’ say ‘Rain'”, he was drawing on years of experience as a professor of phonetics. But research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission suggests that Higgins’s ability to differentiate expertly between similar sounds may have stemmed from birth.
Impact of a bad job on mental health as harmful as no job at all
The impact on mental health of a badly paid, poorly supported, or short term job can be as harmful as no job at all, indicates research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Couples sometimes communicate no better than strangers
Married people may think they communicate well with their partners, but psychologists have found that they don’t always convey messages to their loved ones as well as they think — and in some cases, the spouses communicate no better than strangers.
Gender stereotypes about math develop as early as second grade
Children express the stereotype that mathematics is for boys, not for girls, as early as second grade, according to a new study by University of Washington researchers. And the children applied the stereotype to themselves: boys identified themselves with math whereas girls did not.
Neuro signals study gives new insight into brain disorders
Research into how the brain transmits messages to other parts of the body could improve understanding of disorders such as epilepsy, dementia, multiple sclerosis and stroke.
How incentives can hurt group productivity and shared resources
A study by Professor Stephan Meier, Assistant Professor, Management at Columbia Business School, and co-author Andreas Fuster, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University Department of Economics, which was published in Management Science, an INFORMSR publication, found that while monetary incentives in the workplace, such as subsidies or bonuses, are regarded to be effective ways to encourage staff contributions, incentives can interfere in public and workplace environments dependent on informal norm enforcement.
Why argue? Helping students see the point
Read the comments on any website and you may despair at Americans’ inability to argue well. Thankfully, educators now name argumentive reasoning as one of the basics students should leave school with.
Judging couples’ chemistry influenced by serotonin
The judgements we make about the intimacy of other couples’ relationships are influenced by the brain chemical serotonin, an Oxford University study has found.
How young adolescents respond when their friends are bullied
When supporting a friend who has been victimized by a bully, young adolescents respond with a range of advice and actions. Girls most often suggest telling an adult or confronting the bully to try to understand the conflict, while boys are more apt to minimize the seriousness of the incident or, to the other extreme, encourage aggression toward the assailant, according to a new psychological study at the University of Maine.