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Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn’t make the final cut.

20 June 2012

By Christian Jarrett

Sounds like a good result for geeks – “A curious personality was linked to a wide range of adaptive behaviors including tolerance of anxiety and uncertainty, positive emotional expressiveness, initiation of humor and playfulness, unconventional thinking, and a non-defensive, non-critical attitude

Fusing eastern principles with the essence of cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy could be an exciting new treatment for people with emotional difficulties – a new study tested its effectiveness in an NHS trial.

Just when you finished painting all your walls blue, along comes this study: “we demonstrated that a brief glimpse of green prior to a creativity task enhances creative performance

Study of texting whilst walking finds that texters walk more cautiously, but they bump into door frames just as much as non-texters. My question – why were the non-texters bumping into things?

Apparently, focusing on your goals will increase your intention to pursue them, but reduce your persistence. Trouble is, deliberately not thinking about your goals will probably make you think about them more. So just don’t think, okay!

A Review of Facebook Research in the Social Sciences.

Hmm, interesting – a prosopagnosic (who has trouble processing faces) performed like normal when averaging identity or emotion across a crowd of faces.

How attachment varies through the lifespan.

Thinking about Arabs and Muslims makes Americans shoot faster.

Prince Charles won’t like this one – Exposure to organic foods makes us less altruistic.

Maybe we can cancel out the effects and paint some big eyes on the walls of organic food shops. The presence of eyes led participants to put rubbish in the correct bins.

When we’re at war, we prefer our leaders to be older.