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Women, Men and the Bedroom
In the racy television hit show, Sex and the City, Carrie, one of the main characters tells her best girlfriends that “Men who are too good looking are never good in bed because they never had to be.” This is just one of the many gender stereotypes that audiences were exposed to in this show. The show challenged many stereotypes about sex and gender and refrained from the gender caricatures that typify so much television fare.
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I’m not okay, neither are you
The Sydney Morning Herald: Self-esteem is big business. Peruse the self-help section of any bookshop and you'll find row after row of books dedicated to feeling good, getting happy and making the most out of you. But despite all these apparent solutions, a recent survey by health insurer Bupa found that Australia is the world's most depressed nation. (To make matters worse, the survey also helpfully pointed out that we're rather fat.) Being positive may seem like a good idea - but it's not guaranteed to make our lives more fulfilled. In fact, positive thinking can create an "empathy deficit", argues Barbara Ehrenreich in Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World.
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Worried? Get Your Scrub On
Global Handwashing Day (October 15, 2011) may be on to something! If you’re feeling guilty or doubtful, simply washing your hands or taking a shower may make you feel better. In a literature review published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwartz concluded that “people can rid themselves of a sense of immorality, lucky or unlucky feelings, or doubt about a decision” by cleaning themselves. In one study, scientists found that people asked to judge the moral wrongdoing of others saw them as worse when exposed to an unkempt room or bad odor than when sitting in a clean room.
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<em>Better Angels</em>, Believe It or Not
Two World Wars, the Cold War, and the rise of terrorism must make the past century one of the most violent in the history of our species, right? Not according to Harvard psychologist and APS member Steven Pinker, who argues in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that violence is declining. According to Pinker, we are actually living in the most peaceful era in human history. Watch Pinker’s TED talk on the myth of violence to learn more about why Pinker thinks our “better angels” are winning out. You can learn more about Pinker’s by reading coverage from The New York Times and Time.
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World Series Psychology
The Red Sox won’t be participating in this year’s World Series, but it’s safe to say that the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is here to stay. That makes those teams’ fans an obvious choice for studying rivalry and aggression. Read Wray Herbert’s summary of what happened when Princeton University social neuroscientists studied which neurons light up when loyalists and rivals experience moments of victory or defeat. In other baseball-related psychology, fans aren’t the only ones whose aggression at the baseball stadium has become the subject of psychological research.
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How to Learn by Believing In Yourself
If you want to be smarter, the first step might be to believe that you can get smarter. In a study that will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, Jason S. Moser and his colleagues found that people who believe they can learn from their mistakes are more likely to do so. In the study, participants were asked to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series like “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” This task may seem simple, but task is repeated several times in a row, people tend to make mistakes and feel bad about it.