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Does Alcohol Really Help People Get Along?
Men's Fitness: There’s nothing like an open bar to turn a mandatory office gathering into a late-night party, where even the most argumentative coworkers can get along. But while alcohol has a reputation for breaking down social barriers, does it really work as a social lubricant? To answer this question, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh put strangers together in groups of three and told them they were studying how alcohol would affect their execution of certain tasks.
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Gerichte doelstelling doet tijd sneller gaan (With an objective, time goes faster)
Express Belgium: Aangename activiteiten doen de tijd sneller te lijken gaan, maar vooral de uiteindelijke doelstelling heeft daarin een cruciale functie. Dat is de conclusie van een onderzoek van wetenschappers aan de University of Alabama. De perceptie over het tijdsverloop wordt volgens de Amerikaanse onderzoekers bepaald door de wens om iets na te streven. Het fenomeen kan volgens hen wellicht worden verklaard door het feit dat deze gebeurtenissen het geheugen en de aandacht concentreren, waardoor irrelevante gedachten en gevoelens zouden worden uitgesloten.
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War may not be cause of all military PTSD
United Press International: The experience of war or combat is not typically what triggers the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a Danish researcher says. Professor Dorthe Berntsen of the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research at the Aarhus University in Denmark, military psychologists at the Danish Center for Defense Veterans and researchers from Duke University in North Carolina surveyed 746 Danish soldiers who served in Afghanistan. The soldiers completed a questionnaire five times -- before their posting, during their time in Afghanistan and three times after their return to Denmark.
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Gender Equality Influences How People Choose Their Partners
Men and women clearly have different strategies for picking sexual partners, but the reason why differences exist is less clear. The classic explanation for these differences has been that men’s and women’s brains have evolved to make certain choices, but a new study in Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that evolution is only part of the answer. To be a ‘success’ in evolutionary terms, women need to have access to resources for raising offspring, and men need to have access to fertile females.
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When Do We Lie? When We’re Short on Time and Long on Reasons
Almost all of us have been tempted to lie at some point, whether about our GPA, our annual income, or our age. But what makes us actually do it? In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Shaul Shalvi of the University of Amsterdam and Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev investigated what factors influence dishonest behavior. Previous research shows that a person’s first instinct is to serve his or her own self-interest. And research also shows that people are more likely to lie when they can justify such lies to themselves.
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Repeated Exposure to Media Images of Traumatic Events May Be Harmful to Mental and Physical Health
From 24-hour cable news to YouTube and Twitter, today’s mass media can turn local disasters into international events within minutes, and research reveals that widespread transmission can have a traumatic impact far beyond the people who are directly exposed.
