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Social scientists reveal everything you need to know about holding the perfect meeting
Does your boss have an unhealthy relationship with flow charts? Do your colleagues scroll on their phones during meetings? Do you find meetings that should take 15 minutes last an hour? You’re not alone, but help is on the way thanks to a team of psychological scientists who analyzed nearly 200 scientific studies of workplace meetings. Their report — with actionable tips on how to improve meetings — is published in the latest edition of the peer-reviewed “Current Directions in Psychological Science,” a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Young people are vulnerable to loneliness too
At its most basic level, loneliness is unwanted solitude. However, it can also be a sense of isolation completely unrelated to how many people are around. It’s a feeling that has more to do with the quality of our relationships than our real or virtual friend count. One can feel cripplingly lonely in a crowd and, in many ways, this its worst manifestation − like dying of thirst on a desert island surrounded by cool, blue, undrinkable, seawater. Psychologists distinguish between social loneliness and emotional loneliness. The former is related to fitting in and feeling like we belong, while emotional loneliness is about separation from loved ones.
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Can Childhood Stress Affect the Immune System?
Whether it’s growing up in gut-wrenching poverty, dealing with dysfunctional family dynamics, or coping with persistent bullying in school, extreme adversity can shatter a child’s sense of emotional well-being. But does it also place kids at higher of developing heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions as adults? Katherine Ehrlich, a researcher at University of Georgia, Athens, wants to take a closer look at this question.
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Touch Can Produce Detailed, Lasting Memories
Exploring objects through touch can generate detailed, durable memories for those objects, even when we don’t intend to memorize the object’s details.
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Bringing Up Baby
Bababababa, dadadadada, ahgagaga. Got that? Babies are speaking to us all the time, but most of us have no clue what they're saying. To us non-babies, it all sounds like charming, mysterious, gobbledegook. To researchers, though, babbling is knowable, predictable, and best of all, teachable. This week, we'll find out how to decipher the vocabulary, and the behavior, of the newest members of the human family. In the second half of the show, we'll look at the relationship between children and the adults who care for them.
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How to Handle Difficult Conversations at Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is America’s yearly celebration of family togetherness. But with partisan divisions at a boiling point after the polarizing midterm election and a punishing political year, many are bracing themselves for a war of words at the dinner table this Thursday. For the past two decades, Peter Coleman, the director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict at Columbia University, has been studying what happens when people clash over politics. “There’s been a big increase in contempt for the other side, the idea that they are ignorant, selfish and out to harm America,” said Dr. Coleman, a professor of education and psychology.
