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Study: How Well Do You Know Your Best Friend?
TIME: How often do you fight with your best friend? Your answer is likely related to how well you know her "triggers" — the things that really set her off. For instance, do needy people or attention hogs annoy your friend? Does she think lying is ever okay? If you can answer these intimate questions about your closest friend, a new study in Psychological Science suggests, you probably fight with her less. And knowing such details leads to an overall closer, more rewarding relationship.
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New Study Highlights Gender Differences in Depression
Depression erodes intimate relationships. A depressed person can be withdrawn, needy, or hostile—and give little back. But there’s another way that depression isolates partners from each other. It chips away at the ability to perceive the others’ thoughts and feelings. It impairs what psychologists call “empathic accuracy” —and that can exacerbate alienation, depression, and the cycle by which they feed each other. Three Israeli researchers—Reuma Gadassi and Nilly Mor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Eshkol Rafaeli at Bar-Ilan University—wanted to understand better these dynamics in relationships, particularly the role of gender.
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The Brain Is Not an Explanation
The Huffington Post: "Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked." This headline appeared in the Guardian a few years ago above a science story that began: "Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain." The story went on to describe a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of chocoholics and non-cravers. The study found increased activity in the pleasure centers of the chocoholics' brains, and the Guardian report concluded: "There may also be some truth in calling the love of chocolate an addiction in some people." Really? Is that a fair conclusion to draw from the fMRI data in this study, reported in the European Journal of Neuroscience?
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2011 Summer Institute on Research Methodology, Oregon State University
July 12-13, 2011: Stata & Multilevel/Longitudinal Models Using Stata July 14-15, 2011: Mplus & Longitudinal Modeling Using Mplus The Oregon State University Summer Institute on Research Methodology is sponsored by the College of Health and Human Sciences Methodology Core and the Center for Healthy Aging Research. About the Summer Institute Introductory and advanced coursework using Mplus and Stata will be offered during the Institute. Participants in the Stata session are expected to be comfortable with multiple regression and participants in the Mplus session should also have some familiarity with factor analysis. No knowledge of Mplus or Stata is assumed.
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What’s Your Biggest Regret?
The New York Times: We all have regrets, but new research suggests the most common regret among American adults involves a lost romantic opportunity. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collected data from 370 adults in the United States during a telephone survey. They asked respondents to describe one memorable regret, explaining what it was, how it happened and whether their regret stemmed from something they did or didn’t do. The most common regret involved romance, with nearly one in five respondents telling a story of a missed love connection.
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Teasing Out Policy Insight From a Character Profile
The New York Times: He is a delusional narcissist who will fight until his last breath. Or an impulsive showman who will hop the next flight out of town when cornered. Or maybe he’s a psychopath, a coldly calculating strategist — crazy, like a desert fox. The endgame in Libya is likely to turn in large part on the instincts of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and any insight into those instincts would be enormously valuable to policy makers. Journalists have formed their impressions from anecdotes, or from his actions in the past; others have seized on his recent tirades about Al Qaeda and President Obama.