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Two psychologists followed 1000 New Zealanders for decades. Here’s what they found about how childhood shapes later life
In 1987, Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, two postdocs in psychology, had adjacent displays at the poster session of a conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Caspi, generally not a forward man, looked over at Moffitt's poster and was dazzled by her science. "You have the most beautiful data set," he said. Not one to be easily wooed, Moffitt went to the university library after the meeting and looked up Caspi's citations. Yep, he'd do. "It was very nerdy," Caspi recalls. "We fell in love over our data." It's been a personal and scientific love affair ever since.
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A Brainy New Way of Looking at Friendship
How do we choose our friends? Beyond family ties, there has always been something of a mystery as to why we form close bonds with certain individuals. Sometimes, it seems, two people just click. According to a new study, that fantastic feeling reflects the fact you and your bestie are, neurally speaking, mirror images of one another. "These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive, and respond to, the world around us," writes a research team led by psychologist Carolyn Parkinson of the University of California–Los Angeles.
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Genes play a role in the likelihood of divorce
THAT the children of divorced parents are more likely, when they grow up, to get divorced themselves is well known. What is not known is how much this tendency is the result of nurture (with children manifesting, in later life, behaviours learned from their parents), and how much it is caused by nature (with children inheriting from divorced parents the sorts of genes that lead to marriage-breaking behaviour). That genes are important has, though, now been confirmed by a study published in Psychological Science by Jessica Salvatore and Kenneth Kendler of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioural Genetics.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring trends in adolescent media use and depression, memory amplification following trauma, perceptual inference in autism spectrum disorders, and statistical learning applied to diagnostic predictions.
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The Toolkits of Creative Teams: Lessons from Hollywood Animation
This study found that experts rate animated movies as more creative when animation teams use a variety of tools, most of which were already established in the field.
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Yale’s Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness
NEW HAVEN — On Jan. 12, a few days after registration opened at Yale for Psyc 157, Psychology and the Good Life, roughly 300 people had signed up. Within three days, the figure had more than doubled. After three more days, about 1,200 students, or nearly one-fourth of Yale undergraduates, were enrolled. The course, taught by Laurie Santos, 42, a psychology professor and the head of one of Yale’s residential colleges, tries to teach students how to lead a happier, more satisfying life in twice-weekly lectures. “Students want to change, to be happier themselves, and to change the culture here on campus,” Dr. Santos said in an interview.
