Hormones shape our bodies, make us fertile, excite our most basic urges, and as scientists have known for years, they govern the behaviors that separate men from women. But how?
Anecdotes from creative eminences suggest that executive control plays an important role in creativity, but scientific evidence is sparse. Invoking the Dual Pathway to Creativity Model, the authors hypothesize that working memory capacity (WMC) relates to creative performance because it enables persistent, focused, and systematic combining of elements and possibilities (persistence). Study 1 indeed showed that under cognitive load, participants performed worse on a creative insight task. Study 2 revealed positive associations between time-on-task and creativity among individuals high but not low in WMC, even after controlling for general intelligence. Study 3 revealed that across trials, semiprofessional cellists performed increasingly more creative improvisations when they had high rather than low WMC. Study 4 showed that WMC predicts original ideation because it allows persistent (rather than flexible) processing. The authors conclude that WMC benefits creativity because it enables the individual to maintain attention focused on the task and prevents undesirable mind wandering.
When two women are eating together, one is more likely to put food in her mouth when the other one is doing so too – while one’s food-filled fork is coming towards her mouth, the other one is more likely to do the same within five seconds, researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, reported in PLoS One (The Public Library of Science 1)…
Men put on their best behavior when attractive ladies are close by. When the scenario is reversed however, the behavior of women remains the same.
Share a meal with someone and you are both likely to mimic each other’s behavior and take bites at the same time rather than eating at your own pace, says a study published in the Feb. 2 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE. This behavior was found to be more prominent at the beginning of an interaction than at the end…
New research on autism in adults has shown that adults with a more severe learning disability have a greater likelihood of having autism. This group, mostly living in private households, was previously ‘invisible’ in estimates of autism…
Testosterone makes us overvalue our own opinions at the expense of cooperation, research from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) has found. The findings may have implications for how group decisions are affected by dominant individuals…
A woman’s memory of an experience is less likely to be accurate than a man’s if it was unpleasant and emotionally provocative, according to research undertaken by University of Montreal researchers at Louis-H Lafontaine Hospital…
In theory, the social networking website Facebook could be great for people with low self-esteem. Sharing is important for improving friendships. But in practice, people with low self-esteem seem to behave counterproductively, bombarding their friends with negative tidbits about their lives and making themselves less likeable, according to a new study.
What does being committed to your marriage really mean? A psychology professors answer this question in a new study based on their analysis of 172 married couples over the first 11 years of marriage.
