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A new study published in the journal Emotion has found that playing the classic game of Tetris can help sooth the mind when you are awaiting uncertain news. The Week reports: The venerable video game was used in a recent experiment to create a state of flow -- the term psychologists use to describe a state of mind so engaged it makes the rest of the world fall away, and time pass more quickly. Researchers from University of California (UC) Riverside in the U.S. have found that state of perfect disengagement may improve the otherwise-emotionally unpleasant experience of waiting for uncertain news. In place of Tetris, in which blocks are flipped every which way and stacked into rows, one can substitute flow activities such as rock climbing, carpentry, playing chess, or swimming, researchers said.

For the research published in the journal Emotion, 290 undergraduate students were told the study would be about physical attractiveness. They filled out a questionnaire, after which a photo was taken of them. They were then told that students in another location would rate their physical attractiveness. While they were ostensibly being rated, the students were then asked to play Tetris for 10 minutes. [...] The participants who achieved flow -- those in the adaptive group -- experienced less negative emotion, and greater positive emotion than those who were bored, or for whom the level of play was too difficult.

The New York Times notes an important caveat to Florida's recently-approved law observing daylight savings time year-round: it specifies that their change will only go into effect if "the United States Congress amends 15 U.S.C. s. 260a to authorize states to observe daylight saving time year-round."

"In other words: Even if the governor signs the bill, nothing will happen now... States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time -- Arizona and Hawaii do -- but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time." Meanwhile one California legislator exploring the idea of year-round standard time discovered that "youth sports leagues and families worried that a year-round early sunset would shut down their kids' after-school games." But the Times also acknowledges problems in the current system. "In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. -- more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone." So is there a better alternative?

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Standardtime.com has a unique suggestion. Their proposal has only two time zones in the continental U.S. that are two hours apart, which The Atlantic calls "a simple plan to fix [DST]"... Johns Hopkins University professors Richard Henry and Steven Hanke have come up with yet another possible fix: worldwide adoption of a single time zone. They argue that the internet has eliminated the need for discrete time zones across the globe, so we might as well just do away with them...

No plan will satisfy everyone. But that doesn't mean daylight-saving time is good. The absence of major energy-saving benefits from DST -- along with its death toll, health impacts, and economic ramifications -- are reason enough to get rid of the ritual altogether.
The article associates Daylight Saving Time with "a spike in heart attacks, increased numbers of work injuries, automobile accidents, suicides, and more." And in addition, it also blames DST for an increased use of gasoline and air conditioners -- adding that it will also "rob humanity of billions of hours of sleep like an evil spacetime vampire."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Press Herald: In a study published Monday in the journal Emotion, psychologists from San Diego State University and the University of Georgia used data on mood and media culled from roughly 1.1 million U.S. teens to figure out why a decades-long rise in happiness and satisfaction among U.S. teenagers suddenly shifted course in 2012 and declined sharply over the next four years. Was this sudden reversal a response to an economy that tanked in 2007 and stayed bad well into 2012? Or did it have its roots in a very different watershed event: the 2007 introduction of the smartphone, which put the entire online world at a user's fingertips?

In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders' responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time. They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media, texting, electronic games, the internet -- were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being. By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives. While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighth- and 10th-graders, the authors found: "Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Dot: Scientists have been investigating the impact of violent video games on behavior for more than two decades, and the results are still being debated. In a 2015 resolution on games, the American Psychological Association reported that multiple studies found a link between violent game exposure and aggressive behavior, though critics at the time questioned the findings. Now, a new study published by researchers at the University of York in the journal Computers in Human Behavior further challenges the connection.

It has long been theorized that exposure to in-game concepts like violence has a "priming" effect on players that ultimately impacts behavior, leading scientists to believe that a player exposed to in-game violence will be more susceptible to displaying such violence in real life. The new study found the exact opposite to be true in some instances. In a series of experiments with a little over 3,000 participants (more than any past study to date), university researchers found that exposure to video game concepts like violence won't necessarily impact behavior. It also found that increasing the realism of violent video games does mean aggressive behavior in gamers will increase.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The demand for employees in STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and math) is particularly high, as corporations compete to attract skilled professionals in the international market. What is known as "curriculum intensification" is often used around the world to attract more university entrants -- and particularly more women -- to these subjects; that is to say, students have on average more mandatory math courses at a higher level. Scientists from the LEAD Graduate School and Research Network at the University of Tubingen have now studied whether more advanced math lessons at high schools actually encourages women to pursue STEM careers. Their work shows that an increase in advanced math courses during two years before the final school-leaving exams does not automatically create the desired effects. On the contrary: one upper secondary school reform in Germany, where all high school students have to take higher level math courses, has only increased the gender differences regarding their interests in activities related to the STEM fields. The young female students' belief in their own math abilities was lower after the reform than before. The results have now been published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

itwbennett writes: Researchers at Florida State University have found that simply being aware of a missed call or text can have the same damaging effect on task performance as actually using a mobile phone. 'Although these notifications are short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind-wandering,' the researchers wrote in their paper. In further bad news for chronic multitaskers, a new study by researchers at the University of Connecticut finds that 'students who multitasked while doing homework had to study longer, and those who frequently multitasked in class had lower grades on average than their peers who multitasked less often.'

HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reports on the changing usage of psychostimulants like Adderall. They were once only prescribed to help children with attention deficit disorders focus on their school work, but then college students found those drugs could increase their ability to study. Now a growing number of workers use them to help compete. What will happen as these drugs are more widely used in the workplace? According to Anjan Chatterjee, the use of neurotechnologies to enhance healthy people's brain function could easily become widespread. "If anything, we worship workplace productivity by any means. Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than most others in the developed world. Why not add drugs to energize, focus and limit that annoying waste of time — sleep?" Julian Savulescu says that what defines human beings is their extraordinary cognitive power and their ability to enhance that power through reading, writing, computing and now smart drugs. "Eighty-five percent of Americans use caffeine. Nicotine and sugar are also cognitive enhancers," says Savulescu.

But cognitive neurologist Martha Farah says regular use on the job is an invitation to dependence. "I also worry about the effect of drug-fueled productivity on people other than the users," says Farah. "It is not hard to imagine a supervisor telling employees that this is the standard they should aspire to in their work, however they manage to do it (hint, hint). The eventual result will be a ratcheting up of "normal" productivity, where everyone uses (and the early adopters' advantage is only fleeting)."

HughPickens.com writes Karen Knapton reports at The Telegraph that according to a study at Yale University, because they have the world's knowledge at their fingertips, search engines like Google or Yahoo make people think they are smarter than they actually are giving people a 'widely inaccurate' view of their own intelligence that can lead to over-confidence when making decisions. In a series of experiments, participants who had searched for information on the internet believed they were far more knowledgeable about a subject that those who had learned by normal routes, such as reading a book or talking to a tutor. Internet users also believed their brains were sharper. "The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," says lead researcher Matthew Fisher. "It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet." In the tests searching for answers online leads to an illusion such that externally accessible information is conflated with knowledge "in the head" (PDF). This holds true even when controlling for time, content, and search autonomy during the task. "The Internet is an enormous benefit in countless ways, but there may be some trade-offs that aren't immediately obvious and this may be one of them," concludes Fisher. "Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the Internet may be making that task even harder."

HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "Anna North writes in the NYT that a report released last week by the National Research Council calls for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. But such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. "You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore." says Alan Robock. "Astronomers wouldn't be happy, because you'd have a cloud up there permanently. It'd be hard to see the Milky Way anymore."

According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, losing the night sky would have big consequences. "When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger. There's clearly a neurophysiological basis for that," says Keltner, adding that looking up at a starry sky provides "almost a prototypical awe experience," an opportunity to feel "that you are small and modest and part of something vast." If we lose the night sky "we lose something precious and sacred." "We're finding in our lab that the experience of awe gets you to feel connected to something larger than yourself, see the humanity in other people," says Paul K. Piff. "In many ways it's kind of an antidote to narcissism." And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that's available to almost everybody: "Not everyone has access to the ocean or giant trees, or the Grand Canyon, but we certainly all live beneath the night sky."

Alan Robock says one possible upside of adding aerosols could be beautiful red and yellow sunsets as "the yellow and red colors reflect off the bottom of this cloud." Robock recommends more research into albedo modification: "If people ever are tempted to do this, I want them to have a lot of information about what the potential benefits and risks would be so they can make an informed decision. Dr. Abdalati says deploying something like albedo modification is a last-ditch effort. "We've gotten ourselves into a climate mess. The fact that we're even talking about these kinds of things is indicative of that."

Bennett Haselton writes: A editorial with 24,000 Facebook shares highlights the differences in public reaction to two nearly identical breastfeeding photos, one showing a black woman and one showing a white woman, each breastfeeding an infant. The editorial decries the outrage provoked by the black woman's photo compared to the mild reaction elicited by the white woman's photo, and attributes the difference to racism. I tried an experiment using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to test that theory. Read on to see the kind of results Bennett found.

You can see the side-by-side pictures in the November 10 editorial by Ruby Hamad. My first thought, upon seeing the pictures, was that this is not a controlled experiment -- the woman on the left is breastfeeding in public, while the woman on the right is breastfeeding against a blank wall inside a presumably private room. While I think breastfeeding in public should be completely normalized, it's not the same thing as breastfeeding in private, and so that might have accounted for the difference in reactions, if there was any.

My second thought was that the data on people's reactions was not collected in a systematic way. According to the editorial, the black photo of the black mother, Karlesha Thurman, was posted on the Facebook page Black Women Do Breastfeed, and "[w]hile Karlesha received many supportive comments, the backlash was so severe, she eventually deleted the photo." The photo of the Australian woman, Jacci Sharkey, was posted by the University of the Sunshine Coast on their Facebook page, where it received 275,000 Facebook "likes", but also, according to the editorial, "more than a few detractors, proving that breastfeeding in public is (still!) a contentious issue for women of all races." There's no apples-to-apples comparison gauging people's reactions to the two photos under similar conditions.

But just because the methodology was imprecise, doesn't mean that the underlying phenomenon might not be real. Maybe Internet users really do have different gut reactions to pictures of black women and white women breastfeeding.

One quick way to get a rough answer is Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, where you can pay legions of workers some small amount of money per person to complete some menial task that can't be automated by a computer. I've used it dozens of times for surveys (such as gauging whether people would strongly prefer slideout keyboard phones) and for amateur psychological experiments (including one experiment which suggested that people who answered a math problem correctly were more likely to disagree with an attorney general's dubious legal argument). So I created a poll on Mechanical Turk, limited to U.S. users and with a payout of 25 cents for each person who answered. The poll asked:

Our academic department has asked everyone to submit a "fun" photo of themselves, so that our photos can be displayed together on the department home page. One of our employees submitted a photo that has caused some internal debate about whether the photo is inappropriate. I wanted to do a poll to get the opinion of a random sample of Internet users of different backgrounds.

Do you think this is an appropriate picture to be used in a photo collection on our academic department home page?

Since the original photos had been published in different contexts anyway, I tried to find a middle ground for the wording of the survey question, to emphasize that the photos were going to be published in a "fun" setting, but still integrated into the women's professional environments. The survey-takers were then (randomly) shown either the black woman's photo or the white woman's photo, and answered "Yes, the image is fine" or "No, the image is inappropriate". Then respondents were asked to fill in their age, gender, ethnicity, and education level.

(One thing that I've found with all of my previous surveys on Mechanical Turk, is that there is strong evidence that survey-takers are not answering randomly. Strong correlations often occur where you would expect them to -- for example, in a survey about what are the greatest causes of global strife, the same people tend to select "Energy shortages" and "Environmental damage" above other options, whereas another subgroup will tend to select both "Atheism" and "Decline of traditional values". And any survey where I've added a textbox for users to enter "more thoughts", most users enter something reasonably thoughtful which corresponds to the multiple-choice answers they've selected. Formal research by the psychologist Samuel Gosling has similarly found that Internet surveys can be useful for psychological research and are not plagued with bot-responders or random answers. So I'm working under that assumption.)

The results: Out of 47 respondents who saw the black girl's picture, 36 said the image was inappropriate (77%). Out of 54 respondents who saw the white girl's picture, 38 said the image was inappropriate (70%). For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed. What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos.

In both surveys, both male and female respondents voted the photos "inappropriate" with about the same frequency. For the black woman's photo, 22 out of 26 men (86%) and 14 out of 21 women (67%) voted the photo inappropriate; for the white woman's photo, 19 out of 30 men (63%) and 19 out of 24 women (79%) voted it inappropriate. There also didn't appear to be any correlation between the age of the respondents and their responses. (You can view the breakdown of answers in terms of respondent demographics here for the black woman's picture and here for the white woman's picture; the crummy layout is because I just copied-and-pasted the output from my own custom-written survey-taking tool, where I usually just view the results for myself.) As for the gap between black and white survey-takers, in the case of the black woman's photo, 24 out of 34 white survey-takers (70%) and 5 out of 6 black survey-takers (83%) voted it inappropriate, while for the white woman's photo, 25 out of 36 white survey-takers (69%) and 4 out of 4 (100%) of black survey-takers voted it inappropriate -- but those discrepancies probably don't mean much, since the population of self-identified black respondents was too small in both cases to draw any conclusions.

Even with small samples, though, I would argue that this is a better way to answer the question of latent racism than to draw fuzzy conclusions based on the trolling comments posted on a Facebook photo. My guess is that even if there was an underlying difference in the frequency of negative comments posted to the two photos, part of it could have been due to the photo being posted in a Facebook group titled "Black Women Do Breastfeed", a group name that is practically begging for trolls to wait for a chance to try and provoke an outraged response. The white woman's photo, on the other hand, was posted on the University of the Sunshine Coast Facebook page, which is not the kind of place that maladjusted nitwits hang out trying to start a flame war. And for the trolls who did post on the white woman's photo, their natural inclination would be to make some immature comment about b00bs; whereas for the trolls posting on the black woman's photo, the easiest cheap shot would be to make it about race. But that doesn't mean that there is actually a racially motivated difference in people's reactions to the photos.

Besides, if you want to use Facebook to raise awareness of racism, there are properly controlled scientific experiments that have demonstrated the extent of prejudice, such as the infamous 2003 resume callback experiment which showed that resumes with white-sounding names on them received about 50% more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. A viral story with 24,000 Facebook shares, about two isolated incidents under different circumstances, is not necessarily evidence of racism. It might be. But you have to do some kind of controlled experiment to check first.

Ichijo writes: A new study (abstract) from Duke University tested whether the desirability of a solution affects beliefs in the existence of the associated problem. Researchers found that 'yes, people will deny the problem when they don't like the solution. Quoting: "Participants in the experiment, including both self-identified Republicans and Democrats, read a statement asserting that global temperatures will rise 3.2 degrees in the 21st century. They were then asked to evaluate a proposed policy solution to address the warming. When the policy solution emphasized a tax on carbon emissions or some other form of government regulation, which is generally opposed by Republican ideology, only 22 percent of Republicans said they believed the temperatures would rise at least as much as indicated by the scientific statement they read.

But when the proposed policy solution emphasized the free market, such as with innovative green technology, 55 percent of Republicans agreed with the scientific statement. The researchers found liberal-leaning individuals exhibited a similar aversion to solutions they viewed as politically undesirable in an experiment involving violent home break-ins. When the proposed solution called for looser versus tighter gun-control laws, those with more liberal gun-control ideologies were more likely to downplay the frequency of violent home break-ins."

An anonymous reader writes "A new study published in the March edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicates that a gamer's experience of a video game and not the content of the game itself can give rise to violent behavior. In other words, 'researchers found it was not the narrative or imagery, but the lack of mastery of the game's controls and the degree of difficulty players had completing the game that led to frustration.' Based on their findings, researchers note that even games like Tetris and Candy Crush can inspire violent behavior more so than games like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto if they are poorly designed and difficult to play."

An anonymous reader writes "People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may lead the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. New study (abstract), published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, reveals that individuals can be taught to forget personal feelings associated with an emotional memory without erasing the memory of the actual event."

derekmead writes "While everyone's always waxing like Lord Tennyson about nature being 'red in tooth and claw,' neuroscience and psychology are quietly telling us that we may be innately nicer than we think. Sure, we're not cuddly little bunny rabbits, but many lines of evidence over the past few decades have pointed toward some distinctly physical underpinning of basic morality and aversion to violence, implying that humans (and probably many other animals to) have a strong built-in 'try-not-to-punch-that-dude' mechanism. A recent study published in the journal Emotion, by psychologists Fiery Cushman, Allison Gaffey, Kurt Gray, and Wendy Mendes, provides some further evidence for the link, as the authors put it, 'between the body and moral decision-making processes.'"

thomst writes "The New York Times has an article (cookies and free subscription required) about the protests generated by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology's decision to accept for publication later this year an article (PDF format) on precognition (the Times erroneously calls it ESP). Complaints center around the peer reviewers, none of whom is an expert in statistical analysis."

An anonymous reader writes "The media would have you believe that violent video games will be the downfall of our civilization and the cause of moral decline in young people. A recent study suggests that most people aren't so easily influenced by the violence; instead, just a few bad apples are likely to react poorly, with everyone else showing little or no effect from playing these games." The American Psychological Association has posted the academic paper (PDF) as well, in addition to a few related studies. One examines how games can be a force for good (PDF), and another looks at the motivations behind children playing such games (PDF).

An anonymous reader writes "The media would have you believe that violent video games will be the downfall of our civilization and the cause of moral decline in young people. A recent study suggests that most people aren't so easily influenced by the violence; instead, just a few bad apples are likely to react poorly, with everyone else showing little or no effect from playing these games." The American Psychological Association has posted the academic paper (PDF) as well, in addition to a few related studies. One examines how games can be a force for good (PDF), and another looks at the motivations behind children playing such games (PDF).

An anonymous reader writes "The media would have you believe that violent video games will be the downfall of our civilization and the cause of moral decline in young people. A recent study suggests that most people aren't so easily influenced by the violence; instead, just a few bad apples are likely to react poorly, with everyone else showing little or no effect from playing these games." The American Psychological Association has posted the academic paper (PDF) as well, in addition to a few related studies. One examines how games can be a force for good (PDF), and another looks at the motivations behind children playing such games (PDF).

An anonymous reader writes "The media would have you believe that violent video games will be the downfall of our civilization and the cause of moral decline in young people. A recent study suggests that most people aren't so easily influenced by the violence; instead, just a few bad apples are likely to react poorly, with everyone else showing little or no effect from playing these games." The American Psychological Association has posted the academic paper (PDF) as well, in addition to a few related studies. One examines how games can be a force for good (PDF), and another looks at the motivations behind children playing such games (PDF).

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Brandon Erickson has an interesting post about an experiment on players' emotional reactions to killing and being killed in a first-person shooters (FPS) with a group of students who played James Bond 007: Nightfire while their facial expressions and physiological activity were tracked and recorded moment-to-moment via electrodes and various other monitoring equipment. The study found that "death of the player's own character...appear[s] to increase some aspects of positive emotion." The authors believe this may result from the temporary "relief from engagement" brought about by character death. "Part of this has to do with the intriguing aesthetic question of precisely how the first-person-shooter represents the player after the moment of death," says Clive Thompson. "This sudden switch in camera angle — from first person to third person — is, in essence, a classic out-of-body experience, of exactly the sort people describe in near-death experiences. And much like real-life near-death experiences, it tends to suffuse me with a curiously zen-like feeling." An abstract of the original article, "The psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic emotional responses to violent video game events" is available on the web." Obnoxiously this alleged scholarly research is not available for free, so we'll just have to speculate wildly what it says based on the abstract.

KyDaran was one of several people who wrote about findings in UniSci regarding two studies released in the April issue of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The studies show a relationship between violent and aggressive behavior and video game playing. Check out the full journal study for yourself.