10 years (or 14,600 cups of coffee) later, caffeine is still good for you.

Ten years ago, I shared the encouraging news that caffeine is good for you.

Specifically, for your endothelial function.

Science marches forward and knowledge is constantly advancing, so I’m happy to report that it’s still safe, and even beneficial, to indulge in caffeinated coffee and black tea. (Green tea too, although that’s hardly news.)

However, if (like me) you fancy an after-dinner espresso or a cup of tea before bed, there are some excellent decaf options out there. My unleaded favorites are Ty-Phoo decaf tea, L’Or Decaf Espresso (Nespresso capsules), and Peet’s Decaf Dark Roast (K-Cups).

Now I’m off to brew a big pot of tea and sit down to write!

As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, ‘Someone Is Going to Get Hurt’

By EMILY BAUMGAERTNERAfter researchers created a virus from mail-order DNA, geneticists sound the alarm about the genetic tinkering carried out in garages and living rooms…

Already a research team at the University of Alberta has recreated from scratch an extinct relative of smallpox, horsepox, by stitching together fragments of mail-order DNA in just six months for about $100,000 — without a glance from law enforcement officials.

The team purchased overlapping DNA fragments from a commercial company. Once the researchers glued the full genome together and introduced it into cells infected by another type of poxvirus, the cells began to produce infectious particles.

from NYT Science https://nyti.ms/2rEcPow


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Can a reasoning test predict who will make a good detective?

GettyImages-118096569.jpgBy Alex Fradera
Although criminal investigation has been transformed through technological developments in DNA, phone tracking, and online data, the way a detective works through a crime has remained much the same. The first suspect is often the true perpetrator, but not always, and snowballing biases continue to lead to miscarriages of justice. Proficient detectives need the ability to generate and evaluate different explanations and keep an open mind. New research in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology investigates whether it’s possible to use established tests of reasoning ability to identify who has the skills necessary for thinking this way.
University of Gothenburg psychologists Ivar Fahsing and Karl Ask asked 166 recruits (60 women, aged around 23) from the Norwegian Police University College to complete two tests of reasoning ability. One involved deductive reasoning – the ability to apply rules to reach a correct conclusion, in this case, combining shapes to form a new target shape. The other involved inductive reasoning –  viewing different images, and using these to figure out the rule that is governing them all. These tests already feature in Norwegian police recruitment but it’s not clear whether they are useful for predicting detective skills, which are more dependent on abductive reasoning, which is much harder to test.
Whereas deduction seeks linear, definitive conclusions, and induction tries to identify a category based on the available clues (“all birds, none fly”  therefore the category must be “flightless birds”), abduction amplifies the known information to generate imaginative possibilities (“an open wine bottle and smashed glasses could suggest a thwarted seduction… or a failed reconciliation with his wife?”). It requires a leap of logic, a creative act, hard to measure but known to differentiate stronger investigators, whether criminal or scientific. The ability to make many such leaps helps avoid premature foreclosure on the possibilities of a case.
Fahsing and Ask were hopeful that measures of deductive and inductive reasoning would help identify better detectives because investigation isn’t rooted solely in abduction, and because different forms of reasoning ability are known to correlate (so a candidate skilful at deduction and induction ought to be skilled at abduction and therefore detective thinking too).
To assess detection nous, the researchers asked their participants to review two case vignettes, each describing a woman missing under ambiguous circumstances, and some versions also mentioned the arrest of a suspect. The participants’ task was to outline all the possible explanations that could account for the facts. Both vignettes had been reviewed by an expert panel of detectives, who generated a “gold standard” of 9 viable hypotheses for the first and 11 for the second.
The participants tended to neglect the non-criminal hypotheses, such as the possibility the missing woman had suffered an accident. More importantly, scores on the reasoning ability tests didn’t predict their detective performance. Nor did they predict immunity to a commonly observed detecting error: becoming more narrow-minded (generating fewer hypotheses) after reading that a suspect had been arrested.
The current data suggest that commonly used cognitive assessments are unlikely to help identify candidates with the best aptitude for becoming a detective. It seems police forces will need to think more inventively about the actual skills that contribute to good detection if they are to succeed in separating the Maigrets from the Clouseaus.
— In Search of Indicators of Detective Aptitude: Police Recruits’ Logical Reasoning and Ability to Generate Investigative Hypotheses
Image: Peter Sellers In ‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again’ is disguised as a mountain climber, while hiding in a trash can, in a scene from the film ‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again’, 1976. (Photo by United Artists/Getty Images)
Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest


from BPS Research Digest http://bit.ly/2ovmSuq


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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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The Right Music Can Make People More Cooperative

paff_092016_musiccooperation_newsfeatureMusic is a common feature in many workplaces – from surgery suites to the mechanic’s shop. But when businesses play music, it’s typically to influence the mood of customers. Studies have shown that background music, even when we don’t notice it, can have an effect on our buying preferences. However, relatively little research has studied the impact of music on employee behavior.In a new study, a team of Cornell University researchers found evidence that what we’re listening to at work might influence how willing we are to cooperate with coworkers.
“Based on results from two extended 20-round public goods experiments, we find that happy music significantly and positively influences cooperative behavior,” writes Kevin Kniffin and colleagues. “We also find a significant positive association between mood and cooperative behavior.”
Several previous studies have shown that when prompted with enjoyable music, people end up in a good mood. In a 2010 study published in Psychological Science, University of Western Ontario graduate student Ruby Nadler and colleagues found that participants who listened to snippets of upbeat music (such as Vivaldi’s “Spring”) outperformed those who listened neutral or sad music during a pattern recognition task.
To invoke a good mood in their experiment, Kniffin and colleagues selected peppy songs such as “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles; “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves; “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison; and the theme song from “Happy Days.” The unhappy music playlist included a mix of songs from grindcore metal bands Attack Attack! and Iwrestledabearonce (some on Wikipedia argue that Iwrestledabearonce’s oeuvre should really be classified as punk mathcore).
For the first experiment, 78 college students were randomly assigned to listen to either “happy” music or “unhappy” music over an audio system while completing an economic cooperation task. Each student was seated at an individual computer station with a privacy hood while music was played over the room’s speakers.
During each round of the game, they had the option of allocating a portion of their own store of tokens, which represented small amounts of actual cash, to a shared pool with two other unknown players. Tokens added to the group pool were multiplied in value by 1.5, providing a strong incentive for cooperation.
Across 20 rounds of this game, the participants listening to happy music were found to be more cooperative, contributing more tokens to the shared pot compared to those listening to unhappy music.
In a second experiment, 188 participants were again randomly assigned to listen to either happy music or unhappy music, but this time the researchers also included a control group who did not listen to any music. Participants also completed a short mood assessment survey before, during, and after the experiment.
Again, the researchers “found significantly and persistently higher levels of cooperative behavior by participants who were played Happy music when compared with the other two conditions.”
The mood assessments showed that although mood was relatively consistent across the conditions at the very beginning of the experiment, mood declined for those listening to unhappy music compared to the control group. Essentially, pleasant music seemed to inspire a good mood which led to greater cooperation between teammates.
The researchers note that they did not account for potentially important variables, such as personality traits, that might moderate links among music, mood, and cooperation. Future research could also benefit from more naturalistic experiments, such as allowing participants to select their own music.
Music is an easy way to help boost employees’ mood on the job, which may ultimately help organization create a more positive and cooperative workplace. Choosing music everyone can enjoy may be the bigger challenge; while one person may prefer Mozart, someone else’s good mood inspiration may be Celine Dion or Nodes of Ranvier.
 

References

Kniffin, K. M., Yan, J., Wansink, B., & Schulze, W. D. (2016). The sound of cooperation: Musical influences on cooperative behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior. doi: 10.1002/job.2128
Nadler, R. T., Rabi, R., & Minda, J. P. (2010). Better mood and better performance learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science, 21(12), 1770-1776. doi: 10.1177/0956797610387441
from Minds for Business – Association for Psychological Science http://bit.ly/2cOlJce


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You’re Joking: Detecting Sarcasm in Emails Isn’t Easy

paff_092716_sarcasmcommunication_newsfeature“Well, that meeting was a really fantastic use of my time.”You may want to think twice before hitting send on that email with a sarcastic joke – regardless of whether your boss or your work buddies are on the receiving end.
New research investigating how we determine the emotional content of text is showing that people have a very hard time catching on to sarcasm in emails and texts. This means that written communications aren’t the best medium for making a well-meaning joke; people often interpret a friendly riff as being overtly negative, or they don’t catch the sarcastic tone at all and assume a caustic jibe is actually praise.
Across three studies, Chatham University psychological scientists Monica Riordan and Lauren Trichtinger measured people’s accuracy at gauging the emotional tone of emails sent by both friends and complete strangers. Their results: We’re terrible at it – even when we’re corresponding with our friends.
In one study, participants were assigned to write an email that would evoke one particular emotion, such as disappointment after trying a new restaurant or happiness about getting asked out on a date. Participants then sent these emails to both friends and strangers also enrolled in the study. Both friends and strangers rated the emails for the presence of eight basic emotions, and then sent their own response emails. Additionally, everyone rated how confident they felt in their ability to accurately identify the intended emotional tone of the email.
Although participants were highly confident in their interpretations, especially when communicating with a friend, this confidence had no relationship with accuracy.
“It is clear from this study that readers can determine that we are angry, but cannot determine HOW angry,” said Riordan. “The loss of this subtlety could lead to consequences in many forms– especially in our relationships, where the difference between annoyance and rage can be vast, and a simple misinterpretation of an intended emotion can lead to a drastic alteration in that emotion.”
Research from a team led by Adam D. Galinsky (Northwestern University) finds that when people are in a position of power they’re even worse at accurately predicting how others will interpret a sarcastic comment.
In one experiment, 42 college students read a scenario in which they went to a fancy restaurant recommended by a colleague’s friend, but had a particularly bad dining experience. The next day, an email was sent to the friend who made the recommendation stating only, “About the restaurant, it was marvelous, just marvelous.” Participants then used a 6-point scale to indicate how they thought the friend would interpret the comment, ranging from very sarcastic to very sincere.
Before reading the restaurant scenario, participants were randomly assigned to a high-power or a low-power condition. High-power participants were instructed to recall and write about a personal incident in which they had power over individuals. Participants assigned to the low-power condition were instructed to write about a personal incident in which someone else had power over them.
The results showed that those assigned to the high-power group were much more likely to assume, perhaps mistakenly, that the friend would think the email was clearly sarcastic.
“These findings support our prediction that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to other individuals’ perspectives,” Galinsky and colleagues write in Psychological Science.
If it’s so easy to misinterpret a written message, what can people do to help make their intentions clear? University of Nottingham psychological scientists Dominic Thompson and Ruth Filik found that the use of an expressive smiley face emoticon (such as : ) or ^.^) can provide a helpful cue for when messages are meant sarcastically.
Participants were shown a list of short text message conversations and asked how they would make it clear that a response text was to be taken either literally or sarcastically.
You: So how was the interview?
Friend:  I really can’t tell…
You: Well, you didn’t look confident
In this example, participants would be prompted to modify the wording of the final response in the exchange in such a way as to clearly communicate either sarcasm or a straightforward response. There was no specific mention of emoticons or images.
The results showed that people were “significantly more likely to use emoticons to aid understanding in sarcastic comments than literal ones.” Emoticons were also more likely to occur in texts articulating praise rather than criticism.
Specifically, Thompson and Filik found that the tongue out (:p) and wink (; )) emoticons were the most closely linked with marking sarcasm, and almost never appeared in any condition except for marking sarcasm.
“Importantly, this suggests emoticons may actually be more efficient than ‘standard’ language for marking sarcastic intent,” Thompson and Filik conclude. “That is, the intention can be communicated more quickly via an emoticon than via additional words or phrases, in a way somewhat similar to nonverbal cues in speech.”
 

References

Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1068-1074. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01824.x
Riordan, M. A., & Trichtinger, L. A. (2016). Overconfidence at the Keyboard: Confidence and accuracy in interpreting affect in e‐mail exchanges. Human Communication Research. doi: 10.1111/hcre.12093
Thompson, D., & Filik, R. (2016). Sarcasm in written communication: Emoticons are efficient markers of intention. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 21(2), 105-120. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12156
from Minds for Business – Association for Psychological Science http://bit.ly/2dpqz1U


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Resolve Your Toughest Problems with 5 Questions

In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers managers a five-question framework for facing murky situations and solving tough problems at work.
Approaching a problem as a manager means working with others and doing all you can to really understand the problem. “You don’t decide these things in splendid isolation or with brilliant insights. You get data and use the tools you have to analyze it with other people.” In gray areas, however, discussion and analysis doesn’t produce a final decision. Badaracco says that in these instances, “somebody finally has to say this is what we are going to do and this is why, and that takes an act of judgment.”
Badaracco provides five questions that work as guidelines for making gray-area decisions:

  1. What are the net, net consequences?
  2. What are my core obligations?
  3. What will work in the world as it is?
  4. Who are we?
  5. What can I live with?

“Versions of these questions run through so much of the serious thinking about hard decisions that you find in philosophy, theology, and literature,” he says.
from HBS Working Knowledge http://hbs.me/2bQMmht


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A Good Mood is a Good Motivator

paff_091316_motivatingmood_newsfeatureYou need to alphabetize those files, transcribe last week’s meeting, and then look up some tax codes, but actually motivating yourself to take care of these tedious tasks can be a real challenge. According to new research from APS Fellow James J. Gross (Stanford University) and colleagues, people are much more likely to take on boring, unpleasant tasks when they’re in a good mood.
Continue reading “A Good Mood is a Good Motivator”