Contents
Every day we study dozens of foreign scientific materials in order to select the most interesting and potentially useful for Russian readers. Today we are collecting in one text a brief summary of the five key news of the last month.
1. Dark empaths exist: what are they?
It has long been known that the «dark triad» of negative personality traits includes narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Psychologists from the University of Nottingham Trent (UK) found that the list can be expanded with the so-called “dark empaths”: such people can be even more dangerous to others than those who have little or no empathy. Who is this? Those who take pleasure in harming or manipulating people through the instillation of guilt, the threat of ostracism (social rejection), and mocking jokes.
2. Which question allows you to assess the risk of a couple breaking up?
Couples therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw, through years of experience, has identified a question that says more about a couple’s well-being and resilience than any other facts. This question is “How did you meet?”. According to Earnshaw’s observations, if the couple retained the ability to look at the common past with warmth and tenderness, this is a good sign. And if for each of them the past is painted only in negative tones, then, most likely, the problems in the relationship are so serious that there is a high probability of parting.
3. The Most Boring Jobs Revealed
Scientists from the University of Essex, based on a large-scale survey, compiled a list of traits that indicate the boredom of a person, and correlated this list with professions. They came up with a short list of activities that are most often read as boring: data analysis; accounting; taxation/insurance; banking; cleaning (cleaning). The study is more funny than serious, because each of us can probably remember an amazing cleaning lady with whom it’s nice to chat in the morning, or a ringleading banker.
4. The effects of mild covid on the brain were more serious than we thought
An article was published in the authoritative scientific journal Nature, which analyzed the consequences of a mild covid for the human brain. It turned out that even the asymptomatic form of the disease affects cognitive abilities — the loss of intelligence is estimated at 3-7 points on the classical IQ scale. It is far from always that what is lost can be quickly and easily restored, although certain exercises (for example, picking up puzzles) can be useful.
5. Reading from smartphone screens is still not safe.
Paper books, scientists from the School of Medicine of Showa University (Japan), have proven to be better digested than text on the screen, and provoke less activity in the prefrontal cortex. If everything is clear with the first moment, then what does the second say? And the fact that a person whose prefrontal cortex works “at high speeds” takes less breaths and does not saturate the brain with oxygen properly. Hence the headache that is typical for those who scroll through social networks for hours and read the news from the mobile screen.