Erik Campano
By Erik Campano
2016-10-19T22:00:03Z
Warning: This piece contains material about sexual assault that may be upsetting to some readers.
By Erik Campano
2014-12-07T03:44:40Z
Columbia is going through an unusually acute period of emotionally distressing events and emotions traditionally labelled "negative" -- anxiety, anger, jealousy, sadness -- can spread across a community, in a phenomenon known to psychologists as emotional contagion. Online social networking can exacerbate it; the first studies are coming out on emotional synchronicity across large groups of Facebook users. For instance, it when one person posts a negative Facebook comment about rain, other people who are in a place where it's not raining, are likely to also post a comment displaying negative affect. Anxiety can then grow exponentially across a social network. Columbia's student body is furthermore prone to communal waves of distress, because we inhabit a particularly crowded campus and literally don't get much physical distance from each other.
... By Erik Campano
2014-12-07T00:21:51Z
Grammar first: Despite its disputed acceptance as a third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun, I've used "their" in the title of this piece to mean "his or hers (or other)," because to have written the latter would have created a clunky-sounding question.
... By Erik Campano
2014-12-06T23:16:13Z
Grammar first: Despite its disputed acceptance as a third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun, I've used "their" in the title of this piece to mean "his or hers (or other)," because to have written the latter would have created a clunky-sounding question.
... By Erik Campano
2014-11-27T02:22:32Z
Back in 1972, a now-classic paper by biometeorologists in rainy old England called "Classroom Performance as a Function of Thermal Comfort" reached a conclusion that a lot of students know in their heart is true, but don't want to believe: The warmer a classroom gets, the harder it is to concentrate. Based on the amount of complaining about the wild weather extremes that we've all been hearing at Columbia in the last few days, you'd think that everyone here actually wished they went to Stanford, where all winter it's usually somewhere between 65 and 75 degrees and sunny and you can pluck citrus fruits off trees all over campus. Well, with all due respect to Stanford, as far as climate and academic performance is concerned, science isn't on its side. The English students, at least, were able to think most clearly when the classroom was... a nippy 62 degrees Fahrenheit, and their abilities declined with every degree above that.
... By Erik Campano
2014-11-21T02:20:56Z
Academic psychologists are valuable because, among other reasons, they put names to phenomena that the rest of us need lots of words to describe. In particular, you and your friends may have noticed that in some romantic relationships, one partner seems prepared to handle a potential break-up more easily than the other. Or, to be more specific, one partner thinks that the other would have less trouble if the relationship ended. Psychologists have named this perception of relative un-neediness "dependence power."
... By Erik Campano
2014-11-14T05:44:06Z
For decades scientists have been searching, without success, for a Grand Unified Theory of physics to fully understand phenomena like the Big Bang or the God particle. Meanwhile, a few years ago, Stanford researchers found a Grand Unified Theory of Dogs and People. (Well, actually, that's my name for it. They're still calling it a hypothesis.) They drew it out like this:
... By Erik Campano
2014-10-30T06:08:34Z
As the holiday season passes, the daily American birth rate declines. Fewer and fewer mothers deliver babies as we move chronologically from the fall equinox, on through Thanksgiving, and all the way to Festivus. But there's a blip in the data: Halloween.
... By Erik Campano
2014-10-29T12:14:50Z
You might be in any one of a number of positions as you read this: lying in your bed, squeezed on a cramped bench on the 1 train, hurrying across across a campus quad, or otherwise. So let's play a game. Whatever posture you're in, please focus for a moment on the sensations it is producing on your body. Is your back leaned against something hard, such that you can feel a slight, sharp pressure on that spot? If you're lying in bed, how's your neck? Is it propped at a comfortable angle? If you're stuck down in the subway, is the sweaty arm of the foul-smelling dude next to you forcing you into a pretzel position, leaning away, lest you spend the whole ride rubbing against his hairy skin and picking up his stinky cooties (that's the medical term)? Are you comfortable like that?
... By Erik Campano
2014-10-29T12:13:02Z
Assuming that your first priority is doing well on an exam, as opposed to, say, looking cool while taking it, you should dress as comfortably as possible. Military researchers discovered about five years ago that after all other variables were controlled for, exam takers in cozy, casual clothing like sweatshirts and jogging pants performed better than those in cramped work clothes like suits. The regression line is indisputable:
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