Handling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt.
The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes people feel physically stronger and less dependent on the approval of others to satisfy their needs. “Money activates a general sense of confidence, strength, and efficacy,” the researchers propose.
Read the rest of this news story on Nature News: [html][pdf].
Also summarized by a Mexican outlet, called Reporte Indigo here: [html]
Published online 14 May 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.481 News Thoughts of money soothe social rejection Handling cash also eases physical pain. Lucas Laursen A substitute for social acceptance? PunchstockHandling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists1. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt. The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes people feel physically stronger and less dependent on the approval of others to satisfy their needs. “Money activates a general sense of confidence, strength, and efficacy,” the researchers propose.
A real-life network of scientists, policymakers and journalists linked to stem cell research recently found itself cloned on social networking site Facebook. The originals had no control over the profiles, which used their names and photos and which hijacked their real friends in what’s called a sybil attack. Find out more in my news story, online ahead of next week’s print edition.
A former NASA collaborator has just published a new analysis of his copy of Apollo-era data–NASA lost the originals–from a lunar dust experiment. I reported in an online news story that NASA archivists are trying to recover other Apollo data, too, in advance of the next moon missions.
Earthquake scientists have created some pretty awesome -looking images of the Italian region hit by an earthquake earlier this month. Nature printed [html] one this week, based on my blog post last week. I also blogged about animal researchers who protested violence against them at UCLA and about a TV documentary on controversial human cloning attempts. And while I was covering controversy, I blogged about allegations that Jared Diamond defamed a pair of feuding New Guinean men in a New Yorker article.
Victor Hess first discovered cosmic rays using a Geiger counter and a hot air balloon in 1911. Today physicists are using hundreds of giant water tanks scattered across the Argentine pampas to try to figure out where the mysterious particles come from, I learned in an interview for this week’s Nature’spodcast. Here’s the podcast [mp3], or see a transcript [html].
I also wrote a news story this week about an experiment in which writing short essays about their personal values helped low-performing African-Americans to improve their performance and attitudes towards school for the next two years. And I blogged about claims that genetically-modified crops do not actually improve yields, the first images taken by the planet-hunting space telescope Kepler, and new satellite imagery of the effects of the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy earlier this month.
African-American school students asked to write about their personal values for fifteen minutes at the start of the school year earn higher grades for up to two years afterwards.
The work is a follow-up to a 2006 study in which students were asked to rank the importance of values such as religion, relationships and art and describe what the top value or values meant to them. The intervention reduced the achievement gap between African-American and European-American students by 40%. Low-achieving African-Americans benefited most, getting better grades than students in a control group who were asked to write about why the values they ranked lowest might matter to someone else.
Read the rest of this news story at Nature News [html] or here [pdf]
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
Handling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt.
A real-life network of scientists, policymakers and journalists linked to stem cell research recently found itself cloned on social networking site Facebook. The originals had no control over the profiles, which used their names and photos and which hijacked their real friends in what’s called a sybil attack. Find out more in my news 
Victor Hess first discovered cosmic rays using a Geiger counter and a hot air balloon in 1911. Today physicists are using hundreds of giant water tanks scattered across the Argentine pampas to try to figure out where the mysterious particles come from, I learned in an interview for this week’s Nature’s 