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Be Nice To Yourself
Prevention: “Be kind to yourself.” If you keep good company, someone has probably uttered these words to you at some point, maybe during a particularly hard spell, or at a time when you were being a little too harsh on yourself. It’s always sound advice—irksome though it may be to hear at the time—but new research published in Psychological Science reveals it’s especially apropos when you’re dealing with a broken heart. Self-compassion, according to researchers, may just be the secret to bouncing back after a breakup. In the study, researchers met with recently divorced people to assess how they were coping.
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Caminar, hacer figuras con las manos, alinear objetos, ayuda a solucionar problemas
El Sol de Mexico: Reconozco que soy un autista que trascendió esa condición mediante la palabra, la escritura y, de haberme dedicado al dibujo y la pintura, igual habría superado esa condición. Autista sí porque desde pequeño jugaba a solas, con decenas de clavos, todavía no tenía soldaditos de plomo, que extendía sobre el piso y formaba ejércitos enfrentándose en batallas. Alineaba los clavos: la fila de infantería, la caballería detrás y, a los lados, los batallones en forma de triángulo. Dos ejércitos. Y pronunciaba los diálogos y las órdenes de la batalla. Un día descubrí un vendedor de soldaditos de plomo y fui comprándole decenas de ellos, poco a poco, hasta tener un ciento o más.
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Cash, compassion and morality
The Baltimore Sun: I was a passenger in a car on Thursday morning, and we stopped for a fill-up at a gas station on North Charles Street in Baltimore, a block up from North Avenue. I was on the phone while the driver purchased and pumped the gasoline. A young, male panhandler tried to make eye contact with me through the passenger's side window, but I avoided being drawn into his tractor beam. Some panhandlers appear broken and docile, some seem impatient and even angry; some have yellow heroin eyes or some other form of medicated stare. This one seemed a little frustrated by a series of rush-hour rejections.
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Understanding Brain Functioning
Brenda Milner greatly expanded our understanding of brain functioning through her study of the cognitive deficits associated with temporal and frontal lobe injury. Her most famous work involved a series of experiments with patient H.M., a patient who had most of his medial temporal lobe removed in order to control his severe epilepsy. Although the surgery was successful in controlling his seizures it left him with anterograde amnesia. Milner’s experiments with H.M. not only identified specific brain areas responsible for memory functioning, but also indicated that the brain had more than one memory acquisition system.
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Great Results in the Psych Lab—But Do They Hold Up in the Field?
How well do findings in the psychology lab generalize to real life? This criterion—“external validity”—is probably the most important for experimental psychology. So it was good news when, in 1999, Craig A. Anderson and his colleagues compared laboratory and field research on 38 topics in 21 meta-analyses (or analyses of numerous other studies), and found a lot of agreement between the results of the two. Greg Mitchell, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia School of Law, wanted to know if these findings hold up in a bigger sample—and whether there were differences among different kinds of psychological research.
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Driving Home the Point
When Haneen Saqer, Ewart de Visser, and Jonathan Strohl arrived at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia to talk about the perils of distracted driving, they thought they would be addressing a group of 100 students. Instead, they faced an auditorium of 700 students along with reporters from ABC News and NPR. After all, the trio — who are members of the George Mason University student group Distractions n' Driving (DnD) — had just come to share their graduate research in Human Factors and Applied Cognition. Watch coverage of the program from this ABC 7 News Clip: “We were a bit overwhelmed, but we were prepared,” de Visser says. “The kids really liked it because it was very engaging.
