Science News for Writers

Source:   Power of Positivity A story that may effect the development of your romantic comedies.  Why do people stay in unhappy relationships?  Simply put, it's concern for the partner of the unhappy person. This research doesn't offer solutions to this situation, but does help our understanding of why people behave the way they do. NOTE:  Within five minutes this post had 16 hits, the fastest hit rate of any story I've posted.  Might say something of how people feel. Here's the story: *  *  *  *  * When you are unhappy in a relationship, why do you stay?  The answer may surprise you. Study that finds it's not just the investment of time, resources and emotion Why do people stay in unsatisfying romantic relationships? A new study suggests it may be because they view leaving as bad for their partner. The study, being published in the November 2018 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, e...

Source:   Business Insider Going to bed with your ex might not be as bad you think Pursuing sex with an ex-partner does not always hinder breakup recovery Conventional wisdom holds that people set themselves up for even greater heartache when they jump into bed with their ex-partner after a breakup. However, according to the findings of a study in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, having sex with an ex doesn't seem to hinder moving on after the breakup. This is true even for those who continue to pine for their ex, says lead author Stephanie Spielmann of Wayne State University in the US. For Spielmann, studying the potential costs of sleeping with an ex is of broad interest because sexual experiences with ex-partners are quite common across all age groups and relationship types. Together with her colleagues Spielmann devised two studies. In one, the researchers analysed the daily experiences of 113 participants who had recently experienced a b...

Source:  womenworking.com There is hope for us after all. *  *  *  *  * Selfish people have fewer children and earn less money What happens to those who behave unselfishly and make sacrifices for the sake of others? According to an interdisciplinary study by researchers from Stockholm University, the Institute for Futures Studies and the University of South Carolina, unselfish people tend both to have more children and to receive higher salaries, in comparison to more selfish people. The results have now been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "The result is clear in both the American and the European data. The most unselfish people have the most children and the moderately unselfish receive the highest salaries. And we also find this result over time -- the people who are most generous at one point in time have the largest salary increases when researchers revisit them later in time," says Kimmo Eriksson, resea...

Source:  www.craftbrewingbusiness.com/ O! M! G!  Now it's going too far.  We must do something about climate change today.   Forget what I said yesterday about climate change being a hoax.   This means war! *  *  *  *  * How climate change could cause global beer shortages Severe climate events could cause shortages in the global beer supply, according to new research. The study warns that increasingly widespread and severe drought and heat may cause substantial decreases in barley yields worldwide, affecting the supply used to make beer, and ultimately resulting in 'dramatic' falls in beer consumption and rises in beer prices. Beer is the most popular alcoholic drink in the world by volume consumed. Although the frequency and severity of drought and heat extremes increase substantially in a range of future climate scenarios, the vulnerability of beer supply to such extremes has never been assessed. In rec...

Source:   philmckinney.com Thinking outside the box: Adults with ADHD not constrained in creativity People often believe those with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder face challenges that could hinder future employment, but a new study found that adults with ADHD feel empowered doing creative tasks that could help them on the job. The tendency of individuals with ADHD -- a mental disorder commonly diagnosed at childhood -- to resist conformity and ignore typical information may be an asset in fields that value innovative and nontraditional approaches, such as marketing, product design, technology and computer engineering, said study author Holly White, a researcher in the U-M Department of Psychology. White studied a group of college students with and without ADHD who were compared on lab tasks of creativity. The imagination task allowed a person to invent a new example of a common category that is different from existing examples. In the "alien fruit...

What do Trump's tweets say about his personality? Researchers analyze tweets of Donald J. Trump and  compare his personality traits with other influential business leaders The Twitter messages of Donald J. Trump, the entrepreneurial businessman turned US president, show that he is creative, competitive and a rule-breaker, but also has neurotic tendencies. An analysis of Trump's tweets and what implications his personality traits have for political leadership are the focus of a new study. Since joining the social media platform Twitter in 2009 to May 2017, Trump has issued more than 35,000 messages. This amounts to about twelve tweets a day. With 30 million followers, he is the second most followed politician on Twitter after his predecessor, Barack Obama, who on average tweeted about four times a day. The researchers, Martin Obschonka from the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and Christia...

Personality: Where does it come from and how does it work? How do our personalities develop? What do we come with and what is built from our experiences? Once developed, how does personality work? These questions have been steeped in controversy for almost as long as psychology has existed. In an article in Psychological Review, Carol Dweck tackles these issues. She proposes that our personalities develop around basic needs, and she begins by documenting the three basic psychological needs we all come with:  the need to predict our world,  the need to build competence to act on our world, and, because we are social beings,  the need for acceptance from others. (She also shows how new needs emerge later from combinations of these basic needs.) Infants arrive highly prepared to meet these needs -- they are brilliant, voracious learners on the lookout for need-relevant information. Then, as infants try to meet their needs, something important happen...

Credit: Claudio Grimaldi/EPFL   Schematic view of the Milky Way showing six isotropic extraterrestrial emission processes forming spherical shells filled by radio signals. The outer radii of the spherical shells are  proportional to the time at which the signals were first emitted, while the thicknesses are proportional to the duration of the emissions. In this example, the Earth is illuminated by one of these signals. New tool helps scientists better target the search for alien life Could there be another planet out there with a society at the same stage of technological advancement as ours? To help find out, EPFL scientist Claudio Grimaldi, working in association with the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a statistical model that gives researchers a new tool in the search for the kind of signals that an extraterrestrial society might emit. His method -- described in an article appearing today in Proceedings of the National Aca...

Credit: © canjoena / Fotolia Egoism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism and spitefulness are often grouped together. Those who exhibit one of these traits are more likely to exhibit others from this list. For any writer building the personality of a character, this report provides excellent insight into how some flaws exhibit in a person.  *  *  *  *  * Psychologists define the 'dark core of personality' Egoism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, spitefulness, and others are among the traits that stand for the malevolent dark sides of human personality. As results from a recently published German-Danish research project show, these traits share a common 'dark core'. So, if you have one of these tendencies, you are also likely to have one or more of the others. Both world history and everyday life are full of examples of people acting ruthlessly, maliciously, or selfishly. In psychology as well as in everyday la...