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Stress Eaters May Compensate by Eating Less When Times Are Good
When faced with stress, some people seem to lose their appetite while others reach for the nearest sweet, salty, or fatty snack. Conventional wisdom tells us that stress eaters are the ones who need to
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Learning Vocabulary and Grammar
Janellen Huttenlocher has published on a range of research topics, including language, spatial coding in adults and children, quantitative development, and memory. Huttenlocher has been particularly interested in the role of the child’s environment in the development of cognitive skills. One of her most famous findings is that the verbal behavior of parents and teachers not only determined children’s vocabulary growth, but also their grammatical learning. Huttenlocher has also conducted research on conceptual representation and memory, including the role of concepts in people’s memories of events.
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A Simple ‘Thanks’ Can Tame the Barking Boss
Supervisors often resort to bullying to compensate for their own feelings of incompetence. But studies show that bosses lower their aggression when they feel appreciated.
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Finding the Inner Voices
Hearing voices in one’s head is a hallmark symptom of schizophrenia. Those auditory hallucinations are caused by overstimulation in the brain regions that process sound. But when the inner voices start talking, the brain fails to respond to real voices. Biological psychological scientist Kenneth Hugdahl and his research team identified this paradox when they had hallucinating patients listen to sounds through headphones and measured their brain activity using neuroimaging technology, in addition to psychological measures. They found that the heightened brain activity that is associated with vocal hallucinations simultaneously douses the perception of real sounds.
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Moral in the Morning, But Dishonest in the Afternoon
Our ability to exhibit self-control to avoid cheating or lying is significantly reduced over the course of a day, making us more likely to be dishonest in the afternoon than in the morning, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “As ethics researchers, we had been running experiments examining various unethical behaviors, such as lying, stealing, and cheating,” researchers Maryam Kouchaki of Harvard University and Isaac Smith of the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business explain.
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Mindsets for Self-Improvement
Carol S. Dweck's empirical work has revealed that when we see ourselves as possessing fixed attributes, we blind ourselves to our potential for growth and prematurely give up on engaging in constructive, self-improving behaviors. In contrast, seeing the self as a developmental work in progress can lead to the acquisition of new skills and capabilities. This theoretical framework has been used to address a variety of societal concerns, such as achievement gaps between ethnic or gender groups.