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The Science of Hate in College Football
The Wall Street Journal: In college football, where fans of opposing teams can’t agree on much of anything, they do share one opinion: There is no such thing as a boring rivalry. Rivalry games make or break seasons even when the matchups appear lopsided. This season’s rivalry weekend, for instance, has a number of them: Florida State, Ohio State and Oregon are all in the College Football Playoff race, while rivals Florida, Michigan and Oregon State are all having excruciating seasons. But if any of them pull off an upset Saturday, it would make their year—and ruin their rival’s. The feelings of rivalry are incredibly powerful.
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Saving Old Information Can Boost Memory for New Information
The simple act of saving something, such as a computer file, may improve our memory for the information we encounter next.
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27th Annual Conference of the International Society for Humor Studies
June 29–July 3, 2015 Oakland, California www.hnu.edu/ishs/ISHS2015
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International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies
ISTSS 31st Annual Conference Back to Basics: Integrating Clinical and Scientific Knowledge to Advance the Field of Trauma November 5 -7, 2015 New Orleans, Louisiana www.istss.org
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Leaders Who Can Laugh at Themselves Get a Thumbs Up
Humor in the workplace can foster a positive atmosphere that helps coworkers bond, but jokes in the office can also fall flat, hurt feelings, and can even lead to lawsuits. A new study finds that leaders who strike the right balance, laughing at themselves but not their colleagues or underlings, may be seen as more likable, trustworthy, and caring. Researchers Colette Hoption (Seattle University), Julian Barling (Queen’s University), and Nick Turner (University of Manitoba) hypothesized that, regardless of whether people actually thought a leader was funny, self-deprecating jokes would be seen as an expression of a leader’s values and concern for others.
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Consistent Distraction May Not Hinder Learning
Distraction may not always impair our ability to learn, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research shows that people who are distracted in a similar way when learning a motor task and when trying to recall it later show no impairment in their ability to learn the task. Many of the motor tasks we learn to carry out on a daily basis -- such as driving, playing sports or musical instruments, even walking again after injury -- don't happen in a vacuum, they're performed while other things are going on.