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Enjoy Life More: Use Facebook Less
Pacific Standard: Feeling down? New research from Austria points to a drug-free, no-cost treatment that may very well help: Stop spending so much time on Facebook. In a recently published study, psychologists Christina Sagioglou and Tobias Greitemeyer of the University of Innsbruck report people “expect to feel better after using Facebook, whereas in fact, they feel worse.” Their evidence suggests it’s not Internet browsing in general, but specifically social media use that brings people down. It also points to a likely reason: The nagging feeling that you’ve been wasting time. Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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Eight (No, Nine!) Problems With Big Data
The New York Times: BIG data is suddenly everywhere. Everyone seems to be collecting it, analyzing it, making money from it and celebrating (or fearing) its powers. Whether we’re talking about analyzing zillions of Google search queries to predict flu outbreaks, or zillions of phone records to detect signs of terrorist activity, or zillions of airline stats to find the best time to buy plane tickets, big data is on the case. By combining the power of modern computing with the plentiful data of the digital era, it promises to solve virtually any problem — crime, public health, the evolution of grammar, the perils of dating — just by crunching the numbers. Or so its champions allege.
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Play It Again And Again, Sam
NPR: A couple of years ago, music psychologist decided to make some alterations to the music of . Berio was one of the most famous classical composers of the 20th century, a man internationally recognized for the dramatic power of his compositions. But Margulis didn't worry much about disrupting Berio's finely crafted music. After loading his most famous piece into a computer editing program, she just randomly started cutting. ... And the power of repeated exposure isn't just limited to music. Research has shown that the mere exposure effect makes stockbrokers feel more warmly toward stocks they've seen before; it also works when looking at art or fashion or random geometric shapes.
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We complain about being ‘too busy’ — but secretly we like it
TODAY: We are SO slammed, SO crazed, SO swamped—just so, SO BUSY. Things we are now too busy for include but are not limited to: Any workout lasting longer than 20 minutes, non-speed-reading, making regular coffee in a regular coffee pot. We update our Facebook friends about our crazy skeds in real time, and routinely start emails with an apology about the delay in reply, using our busy-ness as an excuse. ... Inspired by Schulte’s book, Slate writer Hanna Rosin wrote a piece recently about “busy-bragging,” the irresistible urge to whine about your jam-packed schedule.
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Cognitive Style as Environmentally Sensitive Individual Differences in Cognition: A Modern Synthesis and Applications in Education, Business, and Management
Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) The idea that people differ in the way they acquire and process information is not a new one. As early as the 1950s, researchers were examining the idea that people had different cognitive styles -- individually different manners of cognitive processing and functioning. Although this area of research fell out of favor in mainstream psychology during the late 1970s, it continued to be of interest in applied fields such as education and business.
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Treatment Tracker
One of the biggest challenges psychotherapists face is deciding on the appropriate treatment for individual patients. Wolfgang Lutz is an internationally recognized researcher on psychotherapy, and is leading the field in collecting important data about treatment effectiveness and results. He has pioneered the concept of expected treatment response (ETR), which involves an individualized log of each patient’s progress in relation to their expected response to the therapy. His work is helping providers to deliver proven and individually tailored treatment plans and to pre-emptively spot patients at risk for treatment failure.