by Michael Shermer in Scientific American "In the 1922 poem The Waste Land , T. S. Eliot writes, cryptically: Who is the third who always walks beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together /But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you. In...

From TED "Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics...

by David Munger from Seed Magazine "Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly , this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated...

by Adam Hadhazy from Scientific American "As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of "butterflies" in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive...

by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American " Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social...

"Barabási mathematically describes networks in the World Wide Web, the internet, the human body, and society at large. Fowler seeks to identify the social and biological links that define us as humans. In this video Salon, Barabási and Fowler discuss contagion and the Obama campaign, debate the...

by Philip Ball from Nature News "Medieval monarchies might not have had many things to recommend them compared with liberal democracies, but here's one: our rulers have no Fools. How often now will a national leader employ someone to laugh at their folly and remind them of bitter truths? More...

By Richard E. Cytowic in Seed Magazine "From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention...

by Celeste Biever in New Scientist "THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions....

by Natalie Angier in The New York Times "The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage...

By Richard P. Bagozzi, Frank Belschak, Willem Verbek Abstract: Emotional wisdom is defined as a set of seven dimensions of basic skills and meta-narratives concerning how to regulate emotions within specific domains in such a way that the individual's and firm's well-being are tied together....

By Monika Ardelta, Scott D. Landesa and George E. Vaillant Abstract: According to theories of stress-related growth, coping with traumatic events can lead to greater psychosocial maturity in resilient individuals or psychosocial maladjustment in less resilient individuals. Using a sample of 160 World...

By D. Larriviere and M. A. Williams Abstract: Neuroenhancement (NE) refers to the use of prescription medications by healthy persons to boost their cognitive skills. This growing phenomenon represents a potential market not only for pharmaceutical manufacturers but also for physicians who might enter...

By Monika Ardelt Abstract: This study examined whether (a) older adults are wiser than college students, (b) college-educated older adults are wiser than current college students, and (c) wise older adults show evidence of personal growth. Using a sample of 477 undergraduate college students and 178...

by Torsten Zesch and Iryna Gurevych In this article, we present a comprehensive study aimed at computing semantic relatedness of word pairs. We analyze the performance of a large number of semantic relatedness measures proposed in the literature with respect to different experimental conditions, such...

Moral Judgments Recruit Domain-General Valuation Mechanisms to Integrate Representations of Probability and Magnitude By Amitai Shenhav and Joshua D. Greene "Many important moral decisions, particularly at the policy level, require the evaluation of choices involving outcomes of variable magnitude...

By Timothy A. Judge, Remus Iliesb and Nikolaos Dimotakisb Abstract: This study tested a structural model explaining the effects of general mental ability on economic, physical, and subjective well-being. A model was proposed that linked general mental ability to well-being using education, unhealthy...

By Karelitz, T. M., Jarvin, L., & Sternberg, R. J. "Wisdom is a valuable virtue that has been praised, appreciated, and studied throughout the span of human civilization. Yet, wisdom is hard to achieve and harder to apply to one’s life. This chapter presents the main ways in which wisdom has...

By James F. Sumowski, Glenn R. Wylie, DPhil, Nancy Chiaravalloti, and John DeLuca "Learning and memory impairments are prevalent among persons with multiple sclerosis (MS); however, such deficits are only weakly associated with MS disease severity (brain atrophy). The cognitive reserve hypothesis...

By Heidi M. Levitt and Daniel Williams "Eminent therapists across psychotherapy meta-orientations were asked to describe the processes by which they facilitate change in psychotherapy. A grounded theory analysis of these interviews was conducted. Safety within the psychotherapeutic relationship...