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The Secret Benefits of Retelling Family Stories
Telling family stories about crazy Uncle Joe or other eccentric relatives is a favorite pastime when families gather for the holidays. But will squirming children or Instagram-obsessed teens bother to listen? Actually, kids absorb more information from family stories than most adults think. And that knowledge bestows surprising psychological benefits, research shows. The best holiday stories are funny or entertaining and often convey life lessons, says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor and director of Emory University’s Institute for Liberal Arts. “They have a very important function in teaching children, ‘I belong here.
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The world in a song
Although all human cultures appear to create music, the music of different cultures is incredibly varied, leading some scholars to question whether music is really, as Henry Longfellow claimed in 1835, a universal “language” of our species. If true, it would suggest that universal cognitive mechanisms exist that can both explain the unity and allow the diversity of the world's musics. Do such universal mechanisms exist? If so, can we investigate them empirically? On page 970 of this issue, a multidisciplinary team led by Samuel A.
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Why Gratitude Is Wasted on Thanksgiving
As a psychologist, I’ve spent the past 15 years studying how gratitude shapes people’s lives. Research, including my own, has shown that feeling grateful has positive effects on our behavior — making us more honest, increasing our self-control, enhancing our productivity at work and our relationships at home. Given that, you might expect me to think that Thanksgiving is one of the most important days of the year. After all, if there’s a day on which the benefits of gratitude are maximized, surely it’s the national holiday set aside for the purpose of expressing that emotion. ...
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Four Ways Gratitude Helps You with Difficult Feelings
Feeling grateful can bring us a variety of benefits, including better mental and physical health and improved relationships. We tend to think of gratitude as an emotion we experience when things are going well, one that is closely associated with well-being and contentment. But does it serve any purpose when life isn’t so rosy? ... In a 2014 study in Psychological Science, researchers asked 75 participants to remember a time they felt grateful, a time they felt happy, or what they did on a usual day. The participants then made a series of choices between smaller, short-term rewards (i.e., receiving less money but sooner) or larger, long-term rewards (i.e., receiving more money later).
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Avoid Burnout Before You’re Already Burned Out
According to the World Health Organization, burnout is a workplace issue. But just because burnout can happen at work or because of work, doesn’t mean how you use your time outside of work can’t help prevent it. As a time management coach, I’ve seen that at the core, burnout prevention is about living out what is true about your body, your personality and your reality. You don’t need a dream job. But in your overall life, you do need to find time to take care of your health, do things you find refreshing and have a sense of purpose. The closer you are to living your truth, the less likely you are to burnout.
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Fake news grabs our attention, produces false memories and appeals to our emotions
“Fake news” is a relatively new term, yet it’s now seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy and free debate. In the Netflix documentary The Great Hack — which chronicled the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica — we saw how Facebook data was used to target potential voters with insidious right-wing propaganda packaged as if it were news. ... The allure of fake news is therefore reinforced by its relationship to memory formation. A recent study, published in Psychological Science, highlighted that exposure to propaganda may induce false memories.
