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Mood and Experience: Life Comes At You
Living through weddings or divorces, job losses and children’s triumphs, we sometimes feel better and sometimes feel worse. But, psychologists observe, we tend to drift back to a “set point”—a stable resting point, or baseline, in the mind’s level of contentment or unease. Research has shown that the set points for depression and anxiety are particularly stable over time. Why? “The overwhelming view within psychiatry and psychology is that is due to genetic factors,” says Virginia Commonwealth University psychiatrist Kenneth S. Kendler.
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National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquium
The National Academy of Sciences is hosting the Sackler Colloquium “Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners” December 8-10, 2011 in Irvine, CA. The meeting, co-sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and organized by W. Thomas Boyce, Gene E. Robinson and Marla B. Sokolowski, will summon a world class, cross disciplinary assembly of basic, biomedical and social scientists to explore, using new developmental neurogenomic approaches, why disease, disorder and developmental misfortune are so unevenly distributed. The Arthur M.
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How To Quit Smoking? Think About Smoking
The Huffington Post: Paradoxically, the news of the government's plans for grisly anti-smoking ads made me crave a cigarette. I quit smoking many years ago and rarely have a craving anymore, but seeing these ads brought it all back. It also reminded me of the unpleasantness of quitting, including the obsessive thoughts. My quitting strategy was to keep my mind and body busy all the time, in order to keep my thoughts of cigarettes at bay. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't. I relapsed a few times before I finally quit for good. Read more: The Huffington Post
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FDA’s Graphic Cigarette Images: Will they work?
The Sacramento Bee: Can graphic images persuade people to make lasting changes to their behavior? The answer, according to psychological research, is probably not. Dr. Howard Leventhal, the Board of Governors Professor of Health Psychology at Rutgers, agrees that photos are in fact stronger than words, but that images may not lead to long-term behavioral effects. Leventhal states, "You don't need a lot of threat to get something to happen as long as the threat is associated with a clear, simple plan of action. For cigarettes, it's more complicated, you may need a more potent level to get people to change." Read more: The Sacramento Bee
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What Do We Pay Attention To?
U.S. News & World Report: Once we learn the relationship between a cue and its consequences—say, the sound of a bell and the appearance of the white ice cream truck bearing our favorite chocolate cone—do we turn our attention to that bell whenever we hear it? Or do we tuck the information away and marshal our resources to learning other, novel cues—a recorded jingle, or a blue truck? Psychologists observing “attentional allocation” now agree that the answer is both, and they have arrived at two principles to describe the phenomena. The “predictive” principle says we search for meaningful—important—cues amid the “noise” of our environments.
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FDA’s Graphic Cigarette Images: Will They Work?
Can graphic images persuade people to make lasting changes to their behavior? The answer, according to psychological research, is probably not. Howard Leventhal, the Board of Governors Professor of Health Psychology at Rutgers, agrees that photos are in fact stronger than words, but that images may not lead to long-term behavioral effects. Leventhal states, “You don’t need a lot of threat to get something to happen as long as the threat is associated with a clear, simple plan of action.