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Three reminders to help you thrive—not merely survive—in grad school
Grad school does not have the best reputation. The stereotype is that it is a time of so much despair that it seems, as Marge Simpson noted, like a terrible life choice. This idea is not entirely unfounded: Ph.D. and master’s students around the world report rates of depression and anxiety that are six times higher than the general public. When asked how things are going, grad students often respond, “I’m surviving.” And we as an academic community seem to have accepted this as par for the course. My fellow Letters to Young Scientists authors and I think it is time to change that.
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To Cope with Stress, Try Learning Something New
Stressed. Anxious. Exhausted. Drained. This is how many employees feel at work due to stressors like longer work hours, more-frequent hassles, the need to do more with fewer resources, and so on. Such work stress has been shown to induce anxiety and anger, unethical behavior, poor decision making, and chronic exhaustion and burnout — all of which impair personal and organizational performance. There are typically two ways people try to deal with this stress. One is to simply “buckle down and power through” — to focus on getting the stressful work done.
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Researchers replicate just 13 of 21 social science experiments published in top journals
The “reproducibility crisis” in science is erupting again. A research project attempted to replicate 21 social science experiments published between 2010 and 2015 in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. Only 13 replication attempts succeeded. The other eight were duds, with no observed effects consistent with the original findings. The failures do not necessarily mean the original results were erroneous, as the authors of this latest replication effort note. There could have been gremlins of some type in the second try. But the authors also noted that even in the replications that succeeded, the observed effect was on average only about 75 percent as large as the first time around.
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Why You Should Write More Thank You Notes
Research has shown time and time again that being grateful is good for your health, mood and general well-being. In fact, it’s one of the easiest things you can do to increase your mental health. But if you can’t remember the last time you sent a real thank-you note, a recent study may explain why. The research, published recently in Psychological Science, says people chronically underestimate the power of expressing gratitude and overestimate how awkward it will be, which may keep them from engaging in the simple but impactful practice.
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5 Proven Benefits Of Play
It may be a new school year, yet I come to sing the praises of trampolines and bubble-blowing, pillow forts and peekaboo, Monopoly and Marco Polo. A new paper in the journal Pediatrics summarizes the evidence for letting kids let loose. "Play is not frivolous," the paper insists, twice. "It is brain building." The authors — Michael Yogman, Andrew Garner, Jeffrey Hutchinson, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff — ask pediatricians to take an active role by writing a "prescription for play" for their young patients in the first two years of life.
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Why liars lie: What science tells us about deception
We all do it sometimes, even though we know it’s wrong. But here’s the problem with lying: Research shows that the more you lie, the easier it gets, and the more likely you are to do it again. “The dangerous thing about lying is people don’t understand how the act changes us,” said Dan Ariely, behavioral psychologist at Duke. Lying is in the news this week after President Trump's longtime lawyer testified that Trump had directed him to pay hush money to a porn star named Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. The courtroom admission not only implicated Trump in a crime, it also exposed months of denials by Trump and his aides as lies.
