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We’re All Gonna Die! How Fear Of Death Drives Our Behavior
Many people tend to push frightening realities out of mind rather than face them head-on. That's especially true when it comes to the terrifying event that no one can escape — death. Psychologist Sheldon Solomon says people may suppress conscious thoughts about their mortality, but unconscious ones still seep through. In the book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, Solomon, along with psychologists Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, illustrate how death anxiety influences people's behavior in ways they would never suspect.
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The Awkward but Essential Art of Office Chitchat
Every day around the world, an estimated three billion people go to work and 2.9 billion of them avoid making small talk with their co-workers once they get there. Their avoidance strategies vary. Some will keep their headphones in and their eyes low.
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Optimists For The Win: Finding The Bright Side Might Help You Live Longer
Good news for the cheery: A Boston study published this month suggests people who tend to be optimistic are likelier than others to live to be 85 years old or more. That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length — such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say. Their work appears in a recent issue of the science journal PNAS.
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Understanding Cultural Differences Around Social Norms
Q: Societies have norms which you’ve described as tight or loose—what does it mean for norms to be tight or loose, and how is that put into practice? Today more than ever, we need to understand cultural differences. A lot of times, we think about our differences in terms of rather superficial characteristics like red versus blue, East versus West, rich versus poor, religious versus secular. I’m a cross-cultural psychologist and have been trying to understand the deeper codes that drive behavior. My focus has been on the degree to which groups strictly adhere to social norms. All groups have norms, or unwritten rules for behavior.
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Why children become bullies at school
When RubySam Youngz was singled out by a bully at the age of 10 in her last year of primary school, she felt isolated and confused. She’d just moved with her family from England to Wales and the bully honed in on her accent. They then started mocking her appearance. “Nothing really made sense to me,” she says. “I’m in a new place, I don’t really know anyone, no one likes me, and I really do not know why.” Youngz says the relentless bullying, which continued through secondary school, had a knock-on effect in all areas of her life, and she took up smoking and drinking in an attempt to cope.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring reciprocity in early development and links between intentional forgetting and working memory resources.
