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Plum Tea Crazy: A new Tea Shop Mystery by NYT Bestselling Author Laura Childs

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Theodosia Browning investigates a Charleston steeped in tradition and treachery in the latest Tea Shop Mystery from New York Times bestselling author Laura Childs.

While viewing the harbor’s Gaslights and Galleons Parade from the widow’s walk of Timothy Neville’s Charleston mansion, local banker Carson Lanier seemingly tumbles over a narrow railing, then plunges three stories to his death. But a tragic accident becomes something much more sinister when it’s discovered that the victim was first shot with a bolt from a crossbow.
At the request of the mansion owner, Theodosia investigates the tragedy and is soon neck deep in suspects. An almost ex-wife, a coworker, a real estate partner–all had motives for killing the luckless banker, but one resorted to murder to settle accounts.
INCLUDES DELICIOUS RECIPES AND TEA TIME TIPS!
 

Interview with Laura Childs, New York Times bestselling author of Plum Tea Crazy.

Laura, thanks for stopping by Island Confidential. Can you tell us a little bit about your protagonist?
Theodosia Browning is the sassy, outgoing proprietor of the Indigo Tea Shop. Formerly a marketing exec, Theodosia is quick-witted and droll, and has a knack for getting embroiled in police investigations.
How alike are you and Theodosia? 
I’m a former marketing exec myself, but I’ve never gotten involved in a criminal investigation. However, if I met Theodosia in real life I’d probably be analyzing clues right alongside her and trying to figure out a list of suspects.
Do your characters change and evolve throughout consecutive books in the series?
They’re the same characters personality-wise. However, they have grown and evolved a bit over the course of nineteen books. For example, Theodosia and her dog Earl Grey used to live in the apartment above the Indigo Tea Shop. Now they reside in a cute little Hansel and Gretel cottage in Charleston’s historic district.
Have you ever thought of killing someone that you know in real life – on the pages of a murder mystery, I mean?
I haven’t killed anyone from my past in any of my books, but I do get my petty revenge from time to time. I assign their names to killers or characters that I particularly detest!
How realistic is your setting? Do you take liberties or are you true to life?
My Charleston, SC setting is faithful right down to the antique cobblestones. The places I write about – Church Street, Gateway Walk, Duelers Alley, White Point Gardens – are all real places. My job as an author is to capture their charm and allure with words. I want you to picture the Spanish moss swaying in the trees, smell the salty Atlantic air rushing in, and have the feeling of being followed down a narrow, walled-in lane.
When the movie or TV series is made, who plays the major roles?
I think Debra Messing would make a terrific Theodosia

and Michael Caine would be a delightful Drayton.

What’s the worst and best advice you’ve ever heard or received as an author?
Worst advice – English teachers (pretty much all of them) who tried to hammer in that old maxim of “writing what you know about.” If authors did that we’d never have fantastic novels about outer space, time travel, and dinosaurs. Writing is all about creating imagery – a direct product of stretching your imagination!
Best advice – This was an object lesson of sorts. Mystery great Mary Higgins Clark took me under her wing at a Mystery Writers of America symposium and graciously introduced me to several editors and agents. When it came time for lunch – when Mary had a plethora of invitations – she whispered to me that she had to go home and write, that she had a tricky deadline. That’s when I realized that producing pages and meeting deadlines took precedence over panel discussions, lunch, and everything else. I realized that writing was serious business.
BONUS: Stay tuned for a character interview with Theodosia Browning herself!

About the Author

laura-childs-from-facebook
Laura Childs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Tea Shop Mysteries, Scrapbook Mysteries, and Cackleberry Club Mysteries. In her previous life she was CEO/Creative Director of her own marketing firm and authored several screenplays. She is married to a professor of Chinese art history, loves to travel, rides horses, enjoys fund raising for various non-profits, and has two Chinese Shar-Pei dogs.
Laura specializes in cozy mysteries that have the pace of a thriller (a thrillzy!) Her three series are:
The Tea Shop Mysteries – set in the historic district of Charleston and featuring Theodosia Browning, owner of the Indigo Tea Shop. Theodosia is a savvy entrepreneur, and pet mom to service dog Earl Grey. She’s also an intelligent, focused amateur sleuth who doesn’t rely on coincidences or inept police work to solve crimes. This charming series is highly atmospheric and rife with the history and mystery that is Charleston.
The Scrapbooking Mysteries – a slightly edgier series that take place in New Orleans. The main character, Carmela, owns Memory Mine scrapbooking shop in the French Quarter and is forever getting into trouble with her friend, Ava, who owns the Juju Voodoo shop. New Orleans’ spooky above-ground cemeteries, jazz clubs, bayous, and Mardi Gras madness make their presence known here!
The Cackleberry Club Mysteries – set in Kindred, a fictional town in the Midwest. In a rehabbed Spur station, Suzanne, Toni, and Petra, three semi-desperate, forty-plus women have launched the Cackleberry Club. Eggs are the morning specialty here and this cozy cafe even offers a book nook and yarn shop. Business is good but murder could lead to the cafe’s undoing! This series offers recipes, knitting, cake decorating, and a dash of spirituality.
Visit Laura’s webpage or find her on Facebook.

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Well, I'm doomed: Extroverted optimists live longest. 

Who lives the longest?

1. Introverts versus extroverts

Outgoing, sociable people have the strongest immune systems, a recent study finds.

Those who are the most careful, though, are more likely to have a weaker immune system response.

The research found no evidence, though, that a tendency towards negative emotions was associated with poor health.

2. Optimists versus pessimists

Optimists have healthier hearts than pessimists, a study of over 51,000 adults has found.
Professor Rosalba Hernandez, who led the study, said:

“Individuals with the highest levels of optimism have twice the odds of being in ideal cardiovascular health compared to their more pessimistic counterparts.
This association remains significant, even after adjusting for socio-demographic characteristics and poor mental health.”

Optimists also had healthier body mass indexes, were more physically active and less likely to smoke.
Researchers found that the more optimistic people were, the greater their overall physical health.
The most optimistic people were 76% more likely to have health scores that were in the ideal range.

3. Conscientiousness

Men with conscientious personality traits and those who are open to experience live longer, a study has found.

For women, those who are more agreeable and emotionally stable enjoy a longer life.

This means that for women the best personality traits for a long life are:

  1. Extroversion
  2. Optimism
  3. Agreeableness
  4. Emotional stability

Whereas for men, the best traits are:

  1. Extroversion
  2. Optimism
  3. Conscientiousness
  4. Openness to experience

Ask your friends how long you will live

The kicker is that it’s your friends — not you — who are better at judging these personality traits from the outside…
…and consequently predicting how long you will live.
Dr Joshua Jackson, the author of a study on the subject, said:

“You expect your friends to be inclined to see you in a positive manner, but they also are keen observers of the personality traits that could send you to an early grave.
[…]
Our study shows that people are able to observe and rate a friend’s personality accurately enough to predict early mortality decades down the road.
It suggests that people are able to see important characteristics related to health even when their friends were, for the most part, healthy and many years from death.”

Source: 4 Personality Traits That Affect How Long You Will Live – PsyBlog

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Can a ketchup-and-mustard color scheme help you study?

From Psyblog:  
Brightly coloured rooms can boost your concentration, new research finds.

This is the exact opposite of what most people expect, according to the same research.

Two-thirds of people believe that a bright red room was linked to discomfort, depression and annoyance.
When psychologists tested it, though, they found that vivid reds and yellows enhanced students’ concentration.
Aseel Al-Ayash, the study’s first author, said:

“Bright colors can support students’ learning performance by positively affecting psychological and physiological states.
If the reading tasks are difficult, the vivid colour conditions may increase arousal to optimal levels.”

This was the exact reverse of what most expected, Ms Al-Ayash said:

“In general, most participants believed that pale colors with high whiteness would be appropriate color schemes in learning environments, because they are considered calm and relaxing.
However, the calmness and relaxation aspects may not help students to be alert and active.
They performed better in the vivid color conditions, because these colors have arousing properties that stimulate neural activity.
If the task is boring, a red condition may stimulate individuals and enhance their performance.”

The finding is consistent with a century-old psychological finding called the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

 This is simply the idea that people perform at their best when somewhat stimulated.

Too much and too little stimulation, though, tends to make people’s performance worse.
For the research participants read passages of text and had to answer questions afterwards.
They did this in six different rooms painted a variety of colours, including pale and vivid shades or red, blue and yellow.
The results showed that their reading comprehension was higher in the vividly painted red and yellow rooms.
The study was published in the journal Color Research and Application (Al-Ayash et al., 2016).

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The Secret to Better Learning That Most People Don’t Know: Interleaving

brain
Mixing up your learning can lead to massive gains, a new study of academic performance reveals.

 For years now ‘interleaving’ has been a secret largely confined to researchers.

Interleaving means practising or learning different skills in quick succession.
When interleaving, tennis players might practice forehands, backhands and volleys altogether.
Interleaving for musicians could mean practising scales, arpeggios and chords all in the same session.
It’s quite a different method to how people normally learn.
Tennis players typically focus on forehands for a session and musicians on scales for a session.
The benefits have been shown in studies of motor skills:

“…college baseball players practiced hitting three types of pitches (e.g. curve ball) that were either blocked by type or systematically interleaved.
During a  subsequent test in which the three types of pitches were interleaved (as in an actual game), hitting performance was greater if practice had been interleaved rather than blocked.
A similar benefit was observed in a study of basketball shooting…” (Taylor & Rohrer, 2010)

A new study, though, shows the dramatic benefits of interleaving on children’s performance at math.

For the research some kids were taught math the usual way.
They learned one mathematical technique in a lesson and then practised it.
A second group, however, were given assignments which included questions requiring different techniques.
The results were impressive.
On a test one day later, the students who’d been using the interleaving method did 25% better.
But, when tested a month later, the interleaving method did 76% better.
That’s quite an increase given that both groups had been learning for the same amount of time.
The only difference was that some learned block by block and others had their learning mixed up.
One of the potential drawbacks of the technique is that it can feel harder at first.
Instead of concentrating on one skill at a time, you have to work on two or more.
But interleaving probably works because it forces the mind to work harder.
Instead of relying on learning a system and sticking with it, the mind has to keep searching and reaching for solutions.
The research was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology(Rohrer et al., 2015).
from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/2co2Lt6

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Improve your writing by typing with one hand

Forcing yourself to type slower could improve the quality of your writing, a new study finds.

Participants in the study who typed with only one hand produced higher quality essays, researchers found.

Mr Srdan Medimorec, the study’s lead author, said:

“Typing can be too fluent or too fast, and can actually impair the writing process.
It seems that what we write is a product of the interactions between our thoughts and the tools we use to express them.”

People who type quickly may use the first word that comes to hand.
Slowing down allows the mind more time to find the right word.
This could be why forcing yourself to slow down a little improves the sophistication of vocabulary used.
Professor Evan F. Risko, who co-authored the study, said:

“This is the first study to show that when you interfere with people’s typing, their writing can get better.

We’re not saying that students should write their term papers with one hand, but our results show that going fast can have its drawbacks.
This is important to consider as writing tools continue to emerge that let us get our thoughts onto the proverbial page faster and faster.”

Slowing down your writing could help writing quality no matter what input method is used, the authors think.
The same trick could benefit people using pen-and-paper or even speech-to-text.
Slowing down too much, though, can be detrimental.
When people slow to below the rate of normal handwriting, their quality gets worse, previous research suggests.
The study was published in the British Journal of Psychology (Medimorec & Risko, 2016).
from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/2c0lDKV

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How to tell if someone is lying

It may be easier to tell if someone is lying when you cannot see their face, new research finds.

 Contrary to most people’s expectations, being able to see someone’s full face does not help lie detection.

In fact, it actually hurts it.
Dr Amy-May Leach, the study’s first author, explained that the reason may be because it helps people focus on important cues:

“The presence of a veil may compel observers to pay attention to more ‘diagnostic’ cues, such as listening for verbal indicators of deception.”

The finding emerges from a study of the wearing of veils in court.
Witnesses appearing in US, UK and Canadian courts are not allowed to wear a niqab (covering the whole body except for the eyes) or hijab (covering the head and neck).
This is partly because judges believe it is necessary to see the face to tell if someone is lying.
Dr Leach, though, explained that they thought this was wrong:

“We hypothesized that lie detection accuracy would be higher in the niqab condition than in the hijab or no-veil conditions because it would minimize the availability of misleading cues to deception.
It was only when witnesses wore veils (i.e., hijabs or niqabs) that observers performed above chance levels.
Thus, veiling actually improved lie detection.”

The researchers conducted two experiments with a total of 523 participants.
They compared people’s ability to detect lies when witnesses were wearing a hijab or a niqab or neither.
The researchers explained the results:

“Contrary to the assumptions underlying the court decisions cited earlier, lie detection was not hampered by veiling across two studies.
In fact, observers were more accurate at detecting deception in witnesses who wore niqabs or hijabs than those who did not veil.
Discrimination between lie- and truth-tellers was no better than guessing in the latter group, replicating previous findings.”

The study was published in the journal Law and Human Behavior(Leach et al., 2016).
from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/29e8ujJ

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Which Professions Have The Most Psychopaths?

According to a survey conducted by psychologist Kevin Dutton—called the Great British Psychopath Survey—here are the top 10 professions with the most psychopaths:

  1. CEO
  2. Lawyer
  3. Media (TV/Radio)
  4. Salesperson
  5. Surgeon
  6. Journalist
  7. Police Officer
  8. Clergyperson
  9. Chef
  10. Civil Servant

And here are the professions with the least psychopaths:

  1. Care Aide
  2. Nurse
  3. Therapist
  4. Craftsperson
  5. Beautician/Stylist
  6. Charity Worker
  7. Teacher
  8. Creative Artist
  9. Doctor
  10. Accountant

Although people tend to think of psychopaths as killers—indeed about 15-25% of people in prison are psychopaths—in fact many people with psychopathic tendencies are not criminals.
Here are some of the traits of psychopaths:

  • Self-confident
  • Cold-hearted
  • Manipulative
  • Fearless
  • Charming
  • Cool under pressure
  • Egocentric
  • Carefree

from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/29TqRfU

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Reading Fiction Increases Empathy

All sorts of narratives, including literary fiction, TV shows and even certain video games could help boost our fellow-feeling.That is the conclusion of a new review by Professor Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist and novelist.
brain
your brain (artist’s rendition)

Literary fiction, in particular, which simulates the social world, may help to boost our empathy with others.
One study gave people a test of empathy after they had either read some literary fiction or some nonfiction.
It was the literary fiction which produced the most empathetic response in people.
Professor Oatley said:

“The most important characteristic of being human is that our lives are social.
What’s distinctive about humans is that we make social arrangements with other people–with friends, with lovers, with children–that aren’t pre-programmed by instinct.
Fiction can augment and help us understand our social experience.”

 
Professor Oatley said:

“What’s a piece of fiction, what’s a novel, what’s short story, what’s a play or movie or television series?
It’s a piece of consciousness being passed from mind to mind.
When you’re reading or watching a drama, you’re taking in a piece of consciousness that you make your own.
That seems an exciting idea.”

The study was published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Oatley, 2016).
from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/2a9tFE4

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How To Read Personality From Online Profile Pictures

Social media profile pictures can reveal clues about personality, according to new research.

 Thousands of Twitter user’s pictures were included in the study, along with an analysis of their personality.

Here is how to spot each of the five aspects of personality:
1. Conscientiousness
More conscientious people used pictures that were more natural, colourful and bright.
They expressed the most emotions of all the different personality types.
This probably reflects the fact that conscientious people like to do what is expected of them.
2. Openness to experience
People high in openness to experience often had the best pictures: these tended to be sharper, at higher contrast.
Their photos tended to be more artistic or unusual and their faces were often larger in the frame.
3. Extraverts
Extraverts used more colourful images and were more likely to show a group of people rather than just themselves.
Unsurprisingly, they were usually beaming at the camera.
4. Neuroticism
People higher in neuroticism tended to use simpler photos with less colour.

 They were more likely to show a blank expression or even to be hiding their face.

5. Agreeableness
Highly agreeable people post relatively poor pictures of themselves…
…but they are probably smiling and the pictures are bright and lively.
The study’s authors sum up their findings:

“Users that are either high in openness or neuroticism post less photos of people and when these are present, they tend not to express positive emotions.
The difference between the groups is in the aesthetic quality of the photos, higher for openness and lower for neuroticism.
Users high in conscientiousness, agreeableness or extraversion prefer pictures with at least one face and prefer presenting positive emotions through their facial expressions.
Conscientious users post more what is expected of a profile picture: pictures of one face that expresses the most positive emotion out of all traits.
Extraverts and agreeable people regularly post colorful pictures that convey emotion, although they are not the most aesthetically pleasing, especially for the latter trait.”

The study was published in the journal AAAI DIGITAL LIBRARY (Liu et al., 2016).
from PsyBlog http://bit.ly/1XutQe0

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