Innocuity is now a recommended goal in naming a disease. “Discovered a disease? WHO has new rules for avoiding offensive names” is the headline on a report by Kai Kupferschmidt, in ScienceInsider. It says, in part: The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another […]
An empirical investigation of dance addiction
Dancing is mentally dangerous, suggests this new study, which is a further advance in our understanding the threats posed by addiction: “An Empirical Investigation of Dance Addiction,” Aniko Maraz [pictured here], Róbert Urbán, Mark Damian Griffiths, Zsolt Demetrovics, PLoS ONE 10(5), May 7, 2015, e0125988. (Thanks to Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) […]
Partially drunk people can appear more attractive
There’s yet another twist in research news about drunkenness and the perception of beauty. The 2013 Ig Nobel psychology prize was awarded to Laurent Bègue [FRANCE], Brad Bushman [USA, UK, the NETHERLANDS, POLAND], Oulmann Zerhouni [FRANCE], Baptiste Subra [FRANCE], and Medhi Ourabah [FRANCE], for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they […]
Cleanliness at the gym leads to dirty doings, they say
Dire doings at the gym, after cleansing. Ditto at the religious bath. So says this study: “Being Clean and Acting Dirty: The Paradoxical Effect of Self-Cleansing,” Thalma E. Lobel [pictured here], Allon Cohen, Lior Kalay Shahin, Shimon Malov, Yaniv Golan and Shani Busnach, Ethics and Behavior, epub June 27, 2014. (Thanks to Neil Martin for bringing […]