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Down in the dumps? You should be more patriotic! People happiest when they feel like they ‘belong’ to a country
Daily Mail: Feeling proud to be British makes you feel good about life in general, according to scientists. They found that the kind of pride that makes people happiest is when they feel they ‘belong’ to a country, regardless of ethnicity. Researchers studied interviews of 41,000 residents of 31 European nations and found civic pride was most linked to a general feeling of well being. This is often because those who felt a country’s laws, traditions and institutions made them feel they belonged often had a better quality of life overall. The study was conducted jointly by political scientists and sociologists at Washington’s American University and Belgium’s Catholic University.
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Was Darwin Wrong About Emotions?
Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically “basic” emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. This means a recent move to train security workers to recognize “basic” emotions from expressions might be misguided.
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How to spot a liar in 20 seconds flat
msnbc: A little snap judgment goes a long way toward making friends: According to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, all it takes is 20 seconds to decide whether or not a stranger is trustworthy. Researchers recruited 24 couples and asked each person to talk about a time when he or she had suffered. Meanwhile, cameras recorded the reactions of the speaker’s partner. A separate group reviewed the videos, and was able to identify fake compassion in the reacting partners within 20 seconds.
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How We Assign Blame for Corporate Crimes
Yahoo! Canada: Whether the public blames Wall Street or its bankers for bad decisions depends a lot on the group's level of cohesion as well as its mindfulness, or ability to "think," suggests a new study. The researchers wanted to find out how people choose to blame large collectives, such as a major corporation, political party, governmental entity, professional sports team or other organization, while still treating members of those groups as unique individuals. They found that the more people judge a united group as having a "mind"— the ability to think, intend or plan — the less they judge each member as having their own capacity to complete acts requiring such a mind.
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Leaning to the left makes the world seem smaller
NewScientist: If something has gone down in your estimation, check your stance. Leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate everything from the height of buildings to the number of Michael Jackson chart-toppers. To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while stood on a Wii-console balance board. A third of the questions were asked while the volunteers were perfectly upright.
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Nationalister mer nöjda med sina liv
Metro Sverige: Personer som är stolta över sitt land är mer nöjda med sina egna liv än andra, konstaterar forskare i Psychological Science. Men det finns tydliga skillnader mellan olika typer av nationalism. De som var stolta över sitt lands lagar, institutioner och den kulturella mångfalden, var överlag mer nöjda än dem som var stolta på grund av landets ursprung, religion och historia. Studien bygger på en enkät till över 40 000 personer från 31 länder. Read the whole story: Metro Sverige
