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Beware the Long-Winded Leader
The most overbearing talkers in the office can be bad for business. Whether it’s in the conference room or by the water cooler, they display an incessant need to dominate every meeting and every conversation. And if they’re in positions of authority, they can douse any ideas from others. But loquacious folks who aren’t in leadership roles don’t get away with controlling the dialogue, new research shows. Their colleagues simply don’t allow them to hijack a meeting or override anyone else’s input. And that leads to better sharing of information and ideas. The research is based on experimental studies led by psychological scientist Leigh Plunkett Tost of the University of Michigan.
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Hungry? Low Blood Sugar May Increase Support for Social Welfare
Think “Hunger Games” and you’ll undoubtedly think of heroine Katniss Everdeen fighting against a totalitarian state in the blockbuster series of books and movies. Fortunately for us, those Hunger Games are entirely fictional, but new research suggests that we may have developed a different kind of real-world “hunger games” as a way of getting others to share a particularly precious resource: Food.
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Holiday Travelers Take Note: Scientists Explore Roadway Aggression
It’s that time of year again – the time to gather with family and friends, to celebrate the passing of another year…to spend hours in a car dealing with pent-up roadway aggression? According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, long-distance trips increase by 54% in the 6-day period surrounding Thanksgiving and by 23% in the weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. Most of those trips take place in personal automobiles. Being stuck in traffic on a regular day is frustrating enough, but racing to be home for the holidays could make driving at this time of year a particularly fraught endeavor.
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Experiencing Awe Increases Belief in the Supernatural
Awe-inspiring moments -- like the sight of the Grand Canyon or the Aurora Borealis -- might increase our tendency to believe in God and the supernatural, according to new research. The new findings -- published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science -- suggest that awe-inspiring sights increase our motivation to make sense of the world around us, and may underlie a trigger of belief in the supernatural.
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The Nature of Empathy and Compassion
Tania Singer is recognized as a world expert on empathy and compassion, and takes an interdisciplinary approach to study social and moral emotions such as fairness, envy, compassion, and revenge. In addition to brain imaging, her research methods include also game theoretical and psychological tasks, virtual reality environments and measuring biological markers such as the stress hormone cortisol. In a landmark 2004 study, she discovered that some of the same brain regions that are active when we feel pain also react to the knowledge that a loved one is being hurt. Those findings provided evidence that empathy on some level is an automatic, physiological response.
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Memory Science and the Kennedy Assassination
In the same way a flash camera captures a moment in time, decisive events create vivid, long-lasting, and poignant memories. And many of those memories are wrong.