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When feeling good isn’t good enough: Self-control, not self-esteem, is the key to success
New York Daily News: Psychology has identified two different prescriptions for how to solve the personal problems that people face today: self-esteem and self-control. Both have been touted as ways to reduce crime, obesity, school underachievement, teen pregnancy, drug abuse and domestic violence. After conducting dozens of studies and reading hundreds of others, I have concluded that one prescription is snake oil while the other is as close to penicillin as psychology is going to get. Here's my takeaway: Forget bolstering self-esteem. Concentrate on building self-control. Self-control is good for the person who has it, for the people around him or her and, in fact, for society as a whole.
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Attractive individuals may be penalized for good looks
National Post: It isn’t easy being beautiful — at least, not all the time. Two new studies have identified a surprising penalty for good looks, with implications for professional and personal settings alike. Researchers from Germany find the well-known beauty bias is actually flipped when attractive job candidates are appraised by a same-sex evaluator. Researchers from the U.S., separately, show a similarly negative effect when good-looking people have their apologies judged by their own gender. “There are a lot of studies that show attractive people make more money, are more likely to get hired and get lighter sentences in court when they’re convicted of crimes.
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Something for the weekend
Financial Times: We are all familiar with the pain of rejection - not being invited to a party, or being excluded in a conversation. Now a psychology academic and an assistant professor of management and organisation have examined the impact of social rejection. They have concluded that even if individuals are sympathetic to the social snubs experienced by another, they do not understand how upset the person concerned actually feels.
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Hanging up on home phones
The Montreal Gazette: Ever find yourself wondering whether it's worth it to keep and, perhaps more importantly, pay for that home phone line? Even though a majority of Canadian homes have at least one cellphone, most are not completely abandoning their land lines. Statistics Canada says 78 per cent of Canadian households had cellphones in 2010, up from 74 per cent two years earlier. Households with land line phones stood at 67 per cent last year, down from 83 per cent in 2008. But the land line versus cellphone question is one many 20-something Canadians don't even ponder.
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Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education: A Proposed Direction Forward Based on Psychological Science
Read the Full Text While promising future athletes and musicians tend to be identified and actively supported from an early age in the United States, the same intense support is not always provided to children who display academic promise – thus hurting the ability of our most talented individuals to compete in the global economy. This major new report explores the reasons for this disconnect, and brings psychological science to bear on the question of how to better nurture young talent across all fields of endeavor. Academic giftedness is often excluded from major conversations on educational policy as a result of misconceptions about what academic giftedness is and how it arises.
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Scientists Hint at Why Laughter Feels So Good
The New York Times: Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good. The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect. His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said.