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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring how we track other people’s knowledge states, individual differences in face recognition, and self-other agreement in personality reports.
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What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college junior cry: His girlfriend had dumped him; he had been accused of plagiarism. “I just got my first A-minus,” he said, his voice shaking. Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A’s. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers. I was one of them.
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3 in 4 Americans Struggle With Loneliness
Folks feeling lonely as the holidays approach have a lot of company, a new study suggests. Loneliness appears to be widespread among Americans, affecting three out of every four people, researchers have found. Further, loneliness appears to spike at specific times during adulthood. Your late 20s, mid-50s and late 80s are times when you are most at risk of feeling lonely. --- Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience with Brigham Young University in Utah.
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Always Forgetting Important Things? Here’s How to Fix That, According to Science
Most people, when tasked with remembering something important, jot down a note. But a study published recently in the journal Experimental Aging Research says there may be a better way to keep memories fresh: draw a picture. Drawing works your brain in ways that writing alone does not, forcing it to process visual information, translate the meaning of a word into an image and carry out a physical act all at once, says study co-author Melissa Meade, a doctoral candidate in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “It’s bringing online a lot of different brain regions that you wouldn’t bring online if you were just writing information out,” Meade explains.
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Does This Look Right to You? HOLLA🎄D TONNEL
They decked the Holland with boughs of holly Then people called their décor folly. Hundreds signed a web petition Now they’ll vote on their position. As it has in so many Decembers past, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has festooned the canopy above the Holland Tunnel’s New Jersey tollbooth plaza with holiday wreaths. Ordinarily, the sign displays the name of the tunnel in bland letters on an ordinary slab of concrete. But for the holiday season, the Port Authority throws two round wreaths and a triangular tree on top in an attempt to spread seasonal cheer. One wreath covers the letter O of the Holland Tunnel sign in a perfect overlap.
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Here’s why Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of a GOP megadonor, chose science over politics
Elizabeth Koch is obsessed with the self—not just hers, but yours and mine, too. She’s the founder of a neuroscience nonprofit called the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, which aims “to understand the nature of consciousness and its place in nature.” There, researchers are working on figuring out the physical processes underlying the mental experience of existence. They’re trying to uncover the mechanics of mind and matter, asking how the two work together to produce a sense of self. --- To change, Koch had to train herself to care again, to pay attention to all that had been causing her pain and that she’d been trying to ignore.
