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Conjuring Up Our Own Gods
The New York Times: “Americans are obsessed with the supernatural,” Jeffrey J. Kripal, a scholar of religion, told me here at Esalen, an institute dedicated to the idea that “we are all capable of the extraordinary.” Surveys support this. In 2011, an Associated Press poll found that 8 in 10 Americans believed in angels — even 4 in 10 people who never went to church. In 2009 the Pew Research Center reported that 1 in 5 Americans experienced ghosts and 1 in 7 had consulted a psychic. In 2005, Gallup found that 3 out of 4 Americans believed in something paranormal, and that 4 in 10 said that houses could be haunted.
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The Cost of Racial Bias in Economic Decisions
When financial gain depends on cooperation, we might expect that people would put aside their differences and focus on the bottom line. But new research suggests that people’s racial biases make them more likely to leave money on the table when a windfall is not split evenly between groups. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “It has been suggested that race bias in economic decisions may not occur in a market where discrimination is costly, but these findings provide the first evidence that this assumption is false,” explain psychological scientists Jennifer Kubota and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University.
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New EU Declaration on Investment in Social Sciences and Humanities
The European Union (EU) expects research and innovation to be the foundation for its future growth. Horizons 2020, an initiative running from 2014 to 2020 with a budget of a little more than €70 billion, is the EU’s new program for research and innovation and is part of the drive to create new growth and jobs in Europe. In September, a two-day conference was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, organized by the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, to address how socio-economic sciences and humanities can be incorporated into Horizons 2020. The result is the Vilnius Declaration on Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), published on September 24.
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Clinical Psychological Science Call for Papers
We are interested in individual articles as well as series of articles on novel and emerging topics in clinical psychological science. Examples of special interest include Chronic disease and mental health Computational psychiatry Genetics and epigenetics Transdiagnosis and transtreatments Microbiome and connectome and psychopathology Psychoneuroimmunology Diet and micronutrients While each of these specific topics is of keen interest, as a group, they also convey the special thrust of the journal. We are interested in the forefront of science and in taking advantage of multiple advances in theory, assessment, and technology that can inform our core domains and bring together multiple approa…
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Tip-of-the-Tongue Moments May be Benign
Despite the common fear that those annoying tip-of-the-tongue moments are signals of age-related memory decline, the two phenomena appear to be independent, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Veterans With Gulf War Illness Show Brain Changes Linked to Memory Deficits
New research illuminates definitive brain alterations in troops with Gulf War Illness (GWI) thought to result from the exposure to neurotoxic chemicals, including sarin gas, during the first Persian Gulf War. “More than 250,000 troops, or approximately 25% of those deployed during the first Persian Gulf War, have been diagnosed with Gulf War Illness (GWI). Although medical professionals have recognized the chronic and often disabling illness for almost two decades, brain changes that uniquely identify GWI have been elusive until now,” explained researcher Bart Rypma, principal investigator at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas.