A group of psychologists studied individuals with severe mental illness who experienced weekly group music therapy, including singing familiar songs and composing original songs. The results showed that the group music therapy improved the quality of participants' life, with those participating in a greater number of sessions experiencing the greatest benefits. Focusing on singing, another group of psychologists reviewed articles on the efficacy of group singing as a mental health treatment for individuals living with a mental health condition in a community setting. The findings showed that, when people with mental health conditions participated in a choir, their mental health and wellbeing significantly improved. The negative effects of music were greater than the psychologists expected. Group singing provided enjoyment, improved emotional states, developed a sense of belonging and enhanced self-confidence.

Who hasn't used a cup of coffee to help themselves stay awake while studying? Mild stimulants commonly found in tea, coffee, or sodas possibly make you more attentive and, thus, better able to remember. However, you should know that stimulants are as likely to have negative effects on memory as they are to be beneficial. Even if they could improve performance at some level, the ideal doses are currently unknown. If you are wide awake and well-rested, mild stimulation from caffeine can do little to further improve your memory performance. Indeed, if you have too much of a stimulant, you will become nervous, find it difficult to sleep, and your memory performance will suffer.

In a single week, the sun delivers more energy to our planet than humanity has used through the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas through all of human history. And the sun will keep shining on our planet for billions of years. Our challenge isn't that we're running out of energy. It's that we have been focused on the wrong source — the small, finite one that we're using up. Indeed, all the coal, natural gas, and oil we use today is just solar energy from millions of years ago, a very tiny part of which was preserved deep underground. Our challenge, and our opportunity, is to learn to efficiently and cheaply use the much more abundant source that is the new energy striking our planet each day from the sun.

Given the widespread use of emoticons in electronic communication, an important question is whether they help Internet users to understand emotions in online communication. Emoticons, particularly character-based ones, are much more ambiguous relative to face-to-face cues and may end up being interpreted very differently by different users. Nonetheless, research indicates that they are useful tools in online text-based communication. One study of 137 instant messaging users revealed that emoticons allowed users to correctly understand the level and direction of emotion, attitude, and attention expression and that emoticons were a definite advantage in non-verbal communication. In fact, there have been few studies on the relationships between verbal and nonverbal communication. Similarly, another study showed that emoticons were useful in strengthening the intensity of a verbal message, as well as in the expression of sarcasm.

People commonly make the mistaken assumption that because a person has one type of characteristic, then they automatically have other characteristics which go with it. In one study, university students were given descriptions of a guest lecturer before he spoke to the group. Half the students received a description containing the word ‘warm', the other half were told the speaker was ‘cold'. The guest lecturer then led a discussion, after which the students were asked to give their impressions of him. As expected, there were large differences between the impressions formed by the students, depending upon their original information of the lecturer. It was also found that those students who expected the lecturer to be warm tended to interact with him more. This shows that different expectations not only affect the impressions we form but also our behaviour and the relationship which is formed.

What is unusual about journalism as a profession is its lack of independence. In theory, practitioners in the classic professions, like medicine or the clergy, contain the means of production in their heads and hands, and therefore do not have to work for a company or an employer. They can draw their income directly from their clients or patients. Because the professionals hold knowledge, moreover, their clients are dependent on them. Journalists hold knowledge, but it is not theoretical in nature; one might argue that the public depends on journalists in the same way that patients depend on doctors, but in practice a journalist can serve the public usually only by working for a news organization, which can fire her or him at will. Journalists' income depends not on the public, but on the employing news organization, which often derives the large majority of its revenue from advertisers.

When is the right time for the predator to consume the fruit? The plant uses the color of the fruit to signal to predators that it is ripe, which means that the seed's hull has hardened — and therefore the sugar content is at its height. Incredibly, the plant has chosen to manufacture fructose, instead of glucose, as the sugar in the fruit. Glucose raises insulin levels in primates and humans, which initially raises levels of leptin, a hunger-blocking hormone — but fructose does not. As a result, the predator never receives the normal message that it is full. That makes for a win-win for predator and prey. The animal obtains more calories, and because it keeps eating more and more fruit and therefore more seeds, the plant has a better chance of distributing more of its babies.

Psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and sociologist Kurt Back began to wonder how friendships form. Why do some strangers build lasting friendships, while others struggle to get past basic platitudes? Some experts explained that friendship formation could be traced to infancy, where children acquired the values, beliefs, and attitudes that would bind or separate them later in life. But Festinger, Schachter, and Back pursued a different theory. The researchers believed that physical space was the key to friendship formation; that "friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood." In their view, it wasn't so much that people with similar attitudes became friends, but rather that people who passed each other during the day tended to become friends and so came to adopt similar attitudes over time.

Color is an interpretation of wavelengths, one that only exists internally. And it gets stranger, because the wavelengths we're talking about involve only what we call "visible light", a spectrum of wavelengths that runs from red to violet. But visible light constitutes only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum—less than one ten-trillionth of it. All the rest of the spectrum—including radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, cell phone conversations, wi-fi, and so on—all of this is flowing through us right now, and we're completely unaware of it. This is because we don't have any specialized biological receptors to pick up on these signals from other parts of the spectrum. The slice of reality that we can see is limited by our biology.

Sometimes the pace of change is far slower. The face you saw reflected in your mirror this morning probably appeared no different from the face you saw the day before ― or a week or a month ago. Yet we know that the face that stares back at us from the glass is not the same, cannot be the same, as it was 10 minutes ago. The proof is in your photo album: Look at a photograph taken of yourself 5 or 10 years ago and you see clear differences between the face in the snapshot and the face in your mirror. If you lived in a world without mirrors for a year and then saw your reflection, you might be surprised by the change. After an interval of 10 years without seeing yourself, you might not at first recognize the person peering from the mirror. Even something as basic as our own face changes from moment to moment.