Link feast
In case you missed them – 10 of the best psychology and neuroscience links from the past week.
02 August 2013
How would you feel if you lost everything you owned, even if you were financially compensated? Like part of you had died? Or liberated? I examined the psychology of our lifelong relationship with objects for the August issue of The Psychologist. (full contents for the issue).
Did we reach “peak neuro” in 2008? Daniel Engber at Slate magazine argues that the high tide of neuro-bunk has already been and gone. I’m not so sure!
New Naked Neuroscience podcast is devoted to the psychology and neuroscience of humour (more on humour from The Psychologist magazine).
Revenge of the nerds: Once family background is taken into account, high school popularity no longer predicts adult salary.
Spiders may have personalities – Nadia Drake for Wired with an amusing report on a fun study: “Huddling, running, or walking away from the stick suggested that a spider might not be as aggressive than those who held their ground, lurched toward the stick, or raised a leg at it.”
The perfect workspace according to psychology and neuroscience – I gathered the evidence for 99U.com.
Catch up on iPlayer with Extreme OCD Camp from BBC Three. Here’s an accompanying BBC article on living with OCD (and more on OCD from the Digest archive).
Why behaviour change apps don’t work.
Don’t show this to anyone with somnambulism, they might get the wrong idea: “Some experts believe that you can prepare for marathons in your sleep“
Looking ahead to next week: why not visit the female scientists art exhibition curated by psychologist Professor Uta Frith at the Royal Society in London? “Have you ever wondered what the Royal Society’s home would look like if its walls were gender-reversed? If, instead of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, portraits of Kathleen Lonsdale, Elsie Widdowson and Dorothy Hodgkin were the norm?”