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Feeling the ‘Rocky’ in Relationships
The Huffington Post: In 2008, a massive earthquake shook the Chinese province of Sichuan. Measuring 8.0, the quake killed more than 69,000, injured countless more, and left 4.8 million homeless. The Chinese government has spent billions on the region's recovery, which even now is incomplete. The immediate devastation in Sichuan was also followed by a dramatic spike in the divorce rate, a phenomenon that captured international attention -- and sparked widespread speculation -- at the time. Did the deadly earthquake actually cause the jump in marital breakups? The spike might have been a coincidence, though that's unlikely.
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Tylenol Might Dull Emotional Pain, Too
NPR: A common pain medication might make you go from "so cute!" to "so what?" when you look at a photo of a kitten. And it might make you less sensitive to horrifying things, too. It's acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Researchers say the drug might be taking the edge off emotions — not just pain. ... On average, the people who'd taken the acetaminophen said they felt nearly 20 percent less happy when they saw the delightful photos and nearly 10 percent less sad when they saw the dreadful photos compared to those who'd taken the placebo. The same was true for their ratings for the power of each image.
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Learn Self-Control, Stay Off the Dole
Pacific Standard: It’s an age-old debate: Are we the masters of our fate, capable of shaping our own destinies? Or are we at the mercy of our genetics and/or upbringing to such an extent that the trajectories of our lives are pretty much set early on? Newly published research provides evidence supporting the latter, bleaker perspective. An analysis of decades worth of data on two large, nationally representative groups of British citizens finds those who had problems with self-control as children had more trouble finding, and keeping, jobs as adults.
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One Company’s New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year
The New York Times: The idea began percolating, said Dan Price, the founder of Gravity Payments, after he read an article on happiness. It showed that, for people who earn less than about $70,000, extra money makes a big difference in their lives. His idea bubbled into reality on Monday afternoon, when Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000. “Is anyone else freaking out right now?” Mr. Price asked after the clapping and whooping died down into a few moments of stunned silence.
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Getting Women Into Science-Filled Rooms
The Huffington Post: This post is also authored by Lori Holt. Why would three senior professors at Carnegie Mellon University, with responsibilities for research labs, teaching, families, and grand but old houses (this is Pittsburgh), take time to write an article on the distribution of authors by gender in a major journal in their field? It's because we are women, and we saw a pattern that has been all too familiar to us as we made our own way in science -- females were not there. We wrote a discussion piece for the highly regarded international journal Cognition because its special issue highlighting the future of our field, cognitive science, had only one woman author out of 19.
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The worst question you could ask women in a job interview
The Washington Post: During a recent talk in Washington, Google's “people operations” chief Laszlo Bock said something notable about fixing the equal pay conundrum. While he admitted that men tend to negotiate more than women, what he didn't do was suggest — as is so often the case — that solving the gender wage gap is simply a matter of women negotiating more. Rather, he said, “large companies could totally fix this problem.” ...
