Science News for Writers

Source:   Daily Excelsior So, you think you're good at remembering faces, but terrible with names? New research has revealed we are actually better at remembering names than faces The cringe-worthy experience of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name leads many of us to believe we are terrible with names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. With the Christmas party season fast approaching, there will be plenty of opportunity to re-live the familiar, and excruciatingly-awkward, social situation of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name. This cringe-worthy experience leads many of us to believe we are terrible at remembering names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. The authors of the study, from the University of York, suggest that when we castigate ourselves f...

Why we shouldn't like coffee, but we do Weirdly, people with a higher sensitivity to bitter caffeine taste drink more coffee The more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink, reports a new study. The sensitivity is based on genetics. Bitterness is natural warning system to protect us from harmful substances, so we really shouldn't like coffee. Scientists say people with heightened ability to detect coffee's bitterness learn to associate good things with it. Why do we like the bitter taste of coffee? Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances. By evolutionary logic, we should want to spit it out. But, it turns out, the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink, reports a new study from Northwestern Medicine and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia. The sensitivity is caused by a genetic variant. "You'd...

Source:    Discover Magazine Two things in this story attracted my attention. Mammals, especially us, have the ability to selectively forget things.  Since I tend to forget things I'd rather remember, the first isn't really news.  Well, it is.  It's good news that we can selectively forget things.  Now if I could just selectively remember things. And we're related to rats.  Slimey, stinky, vermin-infested, icky, blaaah rats. Upon further consideration, this is not even a slight surprise. *  *  *  *  *  * Selective amnesia: How rats and humans are able to forget distracting memories Our ability to selectively forget distracting memories is shared with other mammals, suggests new research from the University of Cambridge. The discovery that rats and humans share a common active forgetting ability -- and in similar brain regions -- suggests that the capacity to forget plays a vital role in adapting mammal...

I don't want to say that screenwriters are to blame for this, but we are certainly complicit.  In the quest to create the next blockbuster (while creating a upward career path), resorting to violence to resolve situations is an easy out.  While we could point the finger of blame at producers, studio heads and the money people behind them also want product that makes money, and violence often attracts larger audiences.  This is also true of theater owners and even merchandising company executives. There is plenty of blame to go around. *  *  *  *  * 'Good guys' in superhero films more violent than villains New research found that protagonists in superhero films engage in more violent acts than the villains. In a film genre more popular than ever, courageous superheroes wield special powers to protect the public from villains. But despite positive themes these films may offer, new research suggests superhero characters often i...

Source:  cbc.ca/ Wealth is just one factor in how long people live. There's also happiness.  And so on. Here's the report: *  *  *  *  * Rich people don't live that much longer than the poor Economists take income mobility into account when calculating life expectancy Differences in how many extra years rich people live compared to poor people  is only about half of what we thought, according to new research. New research results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), challenge previous findings of huge differences in life expectancy between the rich and those at the bottom of the income scale. In real life people don´t necessarily stay poor or stay rich, as assumed in previous research, and three economists from the University of Copenhagen have now found a way to take this mobility between income-classes into account providing a more realistic way to calculate life expectancy for people...

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...

Thanks to all of the thousands that follow my humble little blog.  Your support means so very much to me. - Jim *  *  *  *  * Writing a 'thank you' note is  more powerful than we realize, study shows New research proves writing letters of gratitude, like Jimmy Fallon's 'Thank You Notes,' is a pro-social experience people should commit to more often. The gesture improves well-being for not only letter writers but recipients as well. Published in Psychological Science, research conducted by assistant professor of marketing in the McCombs School of Business at UT Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley at The University of Chicago asked participants, in three different experiments, to write a letter of gratitude to someone who's done something nice for them and then anticipate the recipient's reaction. In each experiment, letter writers overestimated how awkward recipients would feel about the gesture and underestimated how surprised and positive...

The famous line, "You can't handle the truth," delivered by Jack Nicholson, from A Few Good Men, 1992, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, and Demi Moore, with Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollak, Wolfgang Bodison, James Marshall, J. T. Walsh and Kiefer Sutherland in supporting roles. It was adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin from his play of the same name with contributions by William Goldman. People can handle the truth (more than you think) Most people value the moral principle of honesty. At the same time, they frequently avoid being honest with people in their everyday lives. Who hasn't told a fib or half-truth to get through an awkward social situation or to keep the peace? New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business explores the consequences of honesty in everyday life and determines that people can often afford to be more honest than they think. In the paper, "You Can Handle the Truth: Mispred...

Credit: UBC Media Relations   The researchers asked volunteers to react to simple stick drawings depicting scenes of physical inactivity and physical activity, and discovered that brain activity differed depending on the scene. This is such good news.  I thought it was just me.  No, it's just everybody. What a relief.  Now I can practice sloth without the guilt. Here's the story: *  *  *  *  *  Hardwired for laziness?  Tests show the human brain must work hard to avoid sloth "The research findings suggest that our brains may simply be wired to prefer lying on the couch." If getting to the gym seems like a struggle, a University of British Columbia researcher wants you to know this: the struggle is real, and it's happening inside your brain.  Society has encouraged people to be more physically active, yet we are actually becoming less active. This new study offers a possible explanation: Our brains may be...

Credit: Northwestern University   The four newly determined personality types are based on five widely-recognized character traits. While the authors suggest that this study will be of most interest to hiring managers and mental health professionals, I feel it will be a major help to authors and screenwriters.  A four personality type model makes it easier to develop consistent characters, sort of a checklist of how people's personalities fall into groups. Here's the report: *  *  *  *  * Scientists determine four personality types based on new data Comprehensive data analysis dispels established paradigms in psychology Researchers have sifted through data from more than 1.5 million questionnaire respondents and found at least four distinct clusters of personality types exist: average, reserved, self-centered and role model. They are based on the five widely accepted basic personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agre...