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Who hasn't heard the saying, the only way to heal from pain is through it. Now a new study is saying that it's the way to recover from failure , too. According to newswise.com, our emotional responses to mistakes can lead to improvement. Feeling the pain of failure leads to more effort to correct your mistake than simply thinking about what went wrong, the study says. Researchers found that people who just thought about a failure tended to make excuses for why they were unsuccessful and didn’t try harder when faced with a similar situation.  In contrast, people who focused on their emotions following a failure put forth more effort when they tried again.  “All the advice tells you not to dwell on your mistakes, to not feel bad,” says  Selin Malkoc , co-author of the study and professor of  marketing  at The Ohio State University’s  Fisher College of Business , at newswise.com.  “But we found the opposite. When faced with a failure, it ...

I hate it when I'm interrupted . Now a new study says highly trained workers in some occupations could actually be at risk for making errors when interrupted, according to two Michigan State University psychology researchers, as reported by newswise.com. The reason: Experienced workers are generally faster at performing procedural tasks, meaning their actions are more closely spaced in time and thus more confusable when they attempt to recall where to resume a task after being interrupted. “Suppose a nurse is interrupted while preparing to give a dose of medication and then must remember whether he or she administered the dose,” says Erik Altmann, lead investigator on the project. “The more experienced nurse will remember less accurately than a less-practiced nurse, other things being equal, if the more experienced nurse performs the steps involved in administering medication more quickly.” That’s not to say skilled nurses should avoid giving medication, but on...

When you see red, do you remember it as red? According to a new study , maybe not.  Newswise.com reports that, though people can distinguish among millions of colors, we have trouble remembering specific shades because our brains tend to store what we’ve seen as one of just a few basic hues, a Johns Hopkins University-led team has discovered. New research disputes standard assumptions about memory, demonstrating for the first time that people’s memories for color are biased in favor of “best” versions of basic colors over the colors they actually saw. For example, there’s azure, there’s navy, there’s cobalt and ultramarine. The human brain is sensitive to the differences between these hues —we can, after all, tell them apart. But when storing them in memory, people label all of these various colors as “blue,” the researchers found. The same thing goes for shades of green, pink, purple, etc. This is why, they say, someone would have trouble glancing at the color of ...

I don't know if you're like me but when I get a new symptom or diagnosis from a doctor, I rush online to check out what it is.  Usually, Wikipedia comes up first, and even though I knew better, I usually believe whatever it says. Now doctors are saying that a lot of that information is just, well, wrong. "I think that's the double-edged sword of Wikipedia," Dr. Amin Azzam tells NPR's Arun Rath, as reported at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). "Because anyone can edit, we don't necessarily know the expertise of the people doing the editing. One the other hand, the reason it's so popular is because everyone can contribute." Azzam is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He teaches a course that encourages fourth-year medical students to use their knowledge to improve Wikipedia, one article at a time, as RWJF notes. Azzam tells NPR there's a lot of room for improving the quality of Wiki...