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What is your earliest childhood memory – and did it really happen?
It is a much pondered and discussed subject: your earliest childhood memory. For some, it is their first bee sting or a formative interaction with a parent as a toddler. Others claim to be able to recall lying in a pram. But how sure are you that you have actually remembered this experience, rather than it being informed by photographs and family anecdotes? A new study published in the Psychological Science journal found that 40% of people believe they have a first memory dating back to the age of two or earlier, including having a nappy changed, being in a pushchair or even walking for the first time.
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Confronting Implicit Bias in the New York Police Department
An unarmed black man holding a cellphone, Stephon Clark, is fatally shot in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento and residents ask whether the officers only saw race when pulling their triggers 20 times. Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill black man waving a pistol-shaped metal car part at pedestrians, is gunned down by police officers on a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and the outrage focuses on whether deep-seated prejudices fueled the quick use of deadly force. Two black men are led in handcuffs from a Starbucks in Philadelphia and alarm bells go off: Had the officers unconsciously adopted the racial bias of the store employee who called the police?
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Parents who lack control at work may become more controlling at home
Working at an office job typically involves giving up some measure of control—whether it involves abiding by a dress code, tracking billable hours, or arriving at 9AM sharp. But research shows that workplaces that tilt too far into micromanaging territory wind up with unhappy, stressed-out, unmotivated, low-performing employees. And a recent article by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Originals, argues denying employees autonomy also affects what kinds of parents they are at home.
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In battle for nonverbal dominance at U.S.-Russia summit, Putin was the clear winner, experts say
Carrie Keating was almost slack-jawed with amazement by the end of President Trump’s news conference with Russian leader Vladimir Putin Monday. Keating has studied the nonverbal gestures of politicians for three decades, but she found the performance between the two men on the stage nothing short of incredible. “Whoever made the arrangements, they so clearly favored Putin. You saw him do almost every dominant behavior you could stage in social science lab study,” said Keating, a psychology professor who studies charisma and leadership at Colgate University.
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What Babies Know About Their Bodies and Themselves
We are accustomed to thinking about the importance of what even very young babies see and hear, but “touch is the first sensory system to develop in the baby’s brain prenatally,” and is quite well developed by the time the baby is born, said Andrew Meltzoff, the co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. Dr. Meltzoff was the first author on a study published in late June in the journal Developmental Science, which looked at how 60-day-old infants’ brains responded when different parts of the body were gently tapped. “We know relatively little about how the infant brain responds to touch,” Peter J.
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Is Working Remotely Bad for Your Health?
Imagine rolling out of bed in the morning and, rather than racing to get out the door and into morning traffic, you could go for a run or make yourself breakfast. It’s the kind of daydream every chained-to-his-desk office worker has now and then. And for many, that daydream has become a reality. Following the Great Recession and the rise of the app-driven gig economy, more and more American workers have found themselves jettisoned from traditional office spaces and thrust into jobs that require them to work remotely, at least some of the time.
