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Driving Under the Influence of Friends is Risky for Teens
Teen drivers are far more likely die in car accidents when they drive with friends. According to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, a teen driver's risk of death per mile driven increases by 44% with one teen passenger in the car and quadruples with three or more teen passengers. As a result, many states now have laws limiting the number of passengers allowed in a car with a teen driver. Crash data has long shown that driving with peers dramatically increases the odds of fatal crashes for teens, particularly males, but researchers have been unable to pinpoint exactly why some teens’ driving behavior spins out of control in the presence of their friends.
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Transgender Kids Are Not Confused Or Pretending, Study Finds
BuzzFeed: Transgender children as young as 5 years old respond to psychological gender-association tests just as consistently as children who do not identify as trans, according to a groundbreaking study released this week by researchers at the University of Washington. “Our results support the notion that transgender children are not confused, delayed, showing gender-atypical responding, pretending, or oppositional,” says the study being published in Psychological Science.
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Power Has A Scary Effect On The Brain, According To Science
The Huffington Post: A little bit of power never hurt, right? Well, a study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests otherwise. In this webisode of "Fig. 1," a University of California series that takes a closer look at new research and ideas, psychology professor Dacher Keltner notes that new evidence suggests power has similar effects on the frontal lobes as brain trauma. "Regions of frontal lobes that are now being called the empathy network ... they kind of help us detect other people’s pain," Keltner explains. "When you damage the empathy networks of your brain, which some people do, they become really impulsive. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Worst coaching call ever? Hindsight bias and the Super Bowl
The Conversation: “The worst call in Super Bowl history,” read a headline in my hometown Seattle Times after Seahawks' head coach Pete Carroll seemingly threw the game away with his ill-fated decision to pass – rather than run – as the game clock expired. Actually, Carroll made two end-of-half decisions in Sunday’s Super Bowl, both questioned by the NBC announcers. The differing outcomes of the decisions – and the resulting reactions by pundits and fans – offer potent examples of a mental pitfall that has been the subject of roughly 800 psychological science publications.
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Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?
The New York Times: How reliable is human memory? Most of us believe that our memory is like a video camera, capturing an accurate record that can be reviewed at a later date. But the truth is our memories can deceive us — and they often do. Numerous scientific studies show that memories can fade, shift and distort over time. Not only can our real memories become unwittingly altered and embellished, but entirely new false memories can be incorporated into our memory bank, embedded so deeply that we become convinced they are real and actually happened. ...
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Is Expressing Anger Associated with Good or Bad Health?
BBC: It has traditionally been thought that expressing your anger can be associated with increased blood pressure and higher rates of heart disease. But new research just published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that this is only true in some cultures. Professor Shinobu Kitayama, from the University of Michigan in the United States, looked at large populations in the US and Japan and measured anger being expressed as well as blood pressure and markers of inflammation. The results and analysis have just been published in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: BBC
