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Sense of purpose ‘adds years to life’
BBC: Having a sense of purpose may add years to your life, regardless of what the purpose is, research suggests. Not only does it contribute to healthy aging, but it may also stave off early death, according to a study of 7,000 Americans. The research, published in Psychological Science, applies across adult life, says a US-Canadian team. It may be because purposeful people look after their health better and are physically fitter, they believe. The study tracked the physical and mental health of more than 7,000 US adults aged 20 to 75 years. Read the whole story: BBC
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Predicting Uncertain Events on a Global Scale
When it comes to predicting world events, some of the most influential decisions are fraught with a significant amount of uncertainty: Will this national economy stabilize or crash? Will that country follow through with their promises to halt production of WMDs? Will these public demonstrations lead to democratic change or violent revolt? “Governments rely routinely and heavily on intuitive beliefs about high-stakes outcomes,” write psychology researchers Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, Don Moore, and colleagues. Despite this, training the people who make these intuitive judgments is difficult, because there is little scientific research available that can shed light on the issue.
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Local culture is in your genes
The Boston Globe: Previous research has shown that European-Americans have a more independent social orientation than people from East Asia. However, researchers at the University of Michigan have now qualified this relationship: Cultural differences are only observed among people with certain variants of a gene associated with dopamine function—and reward sensitivity—in the brain. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Cold, Hard Truth: Most People Can’t Handle Multitasking
Inc.: You’ve probably heard by now that multitasking simply doesn’t work. One study out of University of London showed that multitasking lowers your IQ by around 10 points, while Harvard Medical School declared war on the practice after activity-juggling doctors nearly caused fatal errors in treatment. The case against switching tasks seems pretty open and shut. But it seems there may be a few exceptions. A very few.
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Elite Colleges Don’t Buy Happiness for Graduates
The Wall Street Journal: A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think. ... University of Pennsylvania Professor Martin Seligman, who has studied the psychology of happiness, said it was impossible to know whether the college experiences Gallup asked about were the cause of later success or simply coincidental to it. "One hopeful possibility is that if college were changed to produce more emotional support, this would result in much more engagement later in life," he wrote in an email.
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Debunking pseudoscience and studying psychopathy
Scott Lilienfeld is both a researcher of and advocate for psychological science. His clinical work has primarily focused on psychopathy; he developed the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI-R), a 154-item personality test developed to be taken by general, rather than clinical, populations. The PPI-R provides an indication of traits associated with psychopathy without linking them to specific behaviors. Additionally, Lilienfeld has devoted much of his work to correcting the widely misunderstood nature of psychopathy, which is still commonly — but falsely — believed to be a signifier of violent tendencies and psychotic disorders.