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Nothing worse than office peppiness
Chicago Tribune: Every office has a person who has taken a few too many drags on the pep pipe. A manager or co-worker whose sunny disposition can cloud an otherwise delightfully pessimistic day. I'm talking about the patrons of positivity, the bright-siders, the people who see every glass as half full and every mistake as an "error-portunity." You don't have to be like me — a lifelong subscriber to American Cynics Illustrated — to find these folks grating or even to ask whether they are detrimental to the workplace. A recent note from a reader makes a good argument that they are. It described a boss who is an aphorism-spouting optimism addict.
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Parenting style may shape political views of offspring
Asian News International: A new study has linked parenting practices and temperament in childhood to later political ideology. Existing research suggests that individuals whose parents espoused authoritarian attitudes toward parenting (e.g., valuing obedience to authority) are more likely to endorse conservative values as adults. And theory from political psychology on motivated social cognition suggests that children who have fearful temperaments may be more likely to hold conservative ideologies as adults. Unfortunately, almost all of the existing research looking at these two factors suffers from significant methodological shortcomings.
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Social Rejection Could Affect Body’s Immune System, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post: We all know that rejection seriously hurts -- and now a new study shows how it could actually be bad for our health. Scientists from the University of British Columbia, Brandeis University and the University of California, Los Angeles have found that social stressors could affect our immune systems. "Targeted rejection is central to some of life's most distressing experiences -- things like getting broken up with, getting fired, and being excluded from your peer group at school," study researcher Michael Murphy said in a statement.
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This column will change your life: selfishness
The Guardian: It's a fairly well-established fact, in political psychology, that leftwingers report lower levels of happiness than rightwingers. (This fact, you may have noticed, is self-reinforcing: learning of it makes leftwingers even gloomier.) What's much less clear is why. Conservatives like to argue that it's because the things they value – traditional families, faith, free markets – make people happiest. Liberals prefer to think conservatives are blinkered, clinging to an ideology that lets them avoid confronting life's grim truths; it's even been proposed that conservatism might be a mental illness.
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How To Get Over Rejection
Prevention: Anyone who’s been rejected—and sadly, who hasn’t—knows how much it, well, sucks. And now new research in the journal Clinical Psychological Science shows that it can also seriously mess with our physical and mental health. Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) found that women who recently experienced an incident of rejection had elevated levels of pro-inflammatory molecules. When activated, these molecules can trigger inflammation, upping the risk for everything from depression and diabetes to cardiovascular disease and cancer.
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Why Your 4-Year-Old Is As Smart as Nate Silver
Slate: Everyone who spends time with children knows how incredibly much they learn. But how can babies and young children possibly learn so much so quickly? In a recent article in Science, I describe a promising new theory about how babies and young children learn and the slew of research that supports it. The idea is that kids learn by thinking like Nate Silver, the polling analyst extraordinaire at the New York Times. I suspect that most people who, like me, obsessively click his FiveThirtyEight blog throughout the day think of Nate as a semi-divine oracle who can tell you whether your electoral prayers will be answered.
