Life is like a movie

People who watch funny videos on the internet at work aren't necessarily wasting time. They may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science -- putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively. "Generally, positive mood has been found to enhance  creative problem  solving and flexible yet careful thinking," says Ruby Nadler, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario. She and colleagues Rahel Rabi and John Paul Minda carried out a new study published in  Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for  Psychological Science . For this study, Nadler and her colleagues looked at a particular kind of learning that is improved by creative thinking. Students who took part in the study were put into different moods and then given a category learning task to do (they learned to classify sets of pictures with visually complex patterns). The researchers manipulated mood with help from music clips and video clips; first, th...

By   Paul K Pickett,    Lesia Pickett   |  July 03, 2014 The world is full of shady self-help gurus and workplace seminars telling us how we can turn our lives around just by using the right words ("Don't say the cheese is 'spoiled' -- say it's 'aged'!"), as if language is a form of magic that can alter reality. But here's the thing: The human brain is an odd, glitchy machine that is influenced in all sorts of weird ways you never thought of. This is why politicians and salespeople can trick you into going along with them, just by toying with the words they use. Science is just now catching up to them, and has found that ... #6. Repeating Your Opinion Makes People Believe It, No Matter How Stupid It Is Michael Blann/Digital Vision/Getty Images This is one that, sadly, you could have guessed if you follow politics or talk radio: Say it enough, and people will believe it. For example, how many of you think Al Gore claims to have invented t...

Would you believe that people who live with each other for 25 years actuallydevelop similar facial features? I don't just mean that people tend to choose partners who resemble them, rather that over time together couple's features actually converge. It's weird, but there's evidence for it from a singular study carried out by the noted psychologist Robert Zajonc and colleagues. Here's what they did. 110 participants were shown photographs of men and women in their first year of marriage and of the same couples after 25 years of marriage. Then they were asked to judge their resemblance along with the chance that any man and woman were married to each other. The researchers went to a lot of effort to remove extraneous info and crop photos so that only faces could be seen. The types of choices the participants made indicated the perception was that couples became more facially similar after 25 years together. The results could not be explained by people simply all looki...