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Understanding the gift of endless memory
CBS News (60 Minutes): Enter Dr. James McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California Irvine, and a renowned expert on memory. Dr. McGaugh is the first to discover and study superior autobiographical memory, and he is quizzing Owen - his fifth subject - to find out. "Let's move back in time now to 1990. It rained on several days in January and February, can you name the dates on which it rained?" McGaugh asked. Believe it or not, she could. "Let's see. It was slightly rainy and cloudy on January 14th, 15th. It was very hot the weekend of the 27th, 28th, no rain," she replied. Read more: CBS News (60 Minutes)
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What Do We Pay Attention To?
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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The Myth of the ‘Queen Bee’: Work and Sexism
Researchers wondered if the “queen bee” behavior—refusing to help other women and denying that gender discrimination is a problem, for example—might be a response to a difficult, male-dominated environment.
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Ambition + Desire = Trouble
The New York Times: “I DON’T know what I was thinking.” So said Anthony D. Weiner in a news conference moments after finally admitting that he had sent naughty photos of himself to women he had met on the Internet. The married former congressman, who resigned on Thursday, 10 days after that confessional press conference, might not know what he had been thinking — but scientists have an idea or two. Read more: The New York Times
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Income Inequality Costing Americans Their Happiness
LiveScience: Americans are happier in times when the gap between rich and poor is smaller, a new study finds. The reason, according to research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, is that when the income gap is large, lower- and middle-income people feel less trusting of others and expect people to treat them less fairly. The study also provides a potential explanation for why American happiness hasn't risen along with national wealth in the last 50 years. Read more: LiveScience
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When Power Levels Are Equal Women Are Just As Unfaithful As Men, Says New Study
The Huffington Post: Women cheat just as much as men -- at least if they are playing on the same power level. A new study in that will appear in Psychological Science found that infidelity is associated with power, rather than with gender. Researchers in the Netherlands surveyed 1,561 men and women from a range of different professions and compared the sexual infidelities of those who identified themselves as having similar jobs and similar amounts of power.
