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One Way to Make Better Decisions: Rely on Your Imagination More Than Your Willpower
New York Magazine: Maybe you can relate to this particular struggle: When the alarm goes off in the morning, some people use the snooze button for five more sweet, sweet minutes of sleep. I use it for 30 of them, give or take. I gorge on the snooze button. It’s gotten so bad that I now set my first alarm for much earlier than I actually need to be awake, just so I can keep on snoozing a little while longer. Yes, I know I really should be getting up and starting the day and all that, but it’s so hard when you’re just so cozy. Which might actually be the root of the problem: I’m thinking about the trade-offs all wrong.
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Some People Are Great At Recognizing Faces. Others…Not So Much
NPR: Every day, Marty Doerschlag moves through the world armed with what amounts to a low-level superpower: He can remember a face forever. "If I spend about 30 seconds looking at somebody, I will remember their face for years and years and years," he says. ... "I think nobody really knew until the last few years just how bad we all are with unfamiliar faces," says Mike Burton, a professor of psychology at the University of York UK. Burton has run a number of facial recognition studies and has concluded that most people are remarkably bad at recognizing the faces of those they know only slightly. And to make matters worse, most people think they are good at this skill when they are not.
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How High-School Popularity Follows You Into Adulthood
New York Magazine: Although we don’t talk much about antiquated psychological concepts like the id, ego, superego, and unconscious anymore, we do know that there are plenty of actions we take without thinking—feelings that seem to bubble up from nowhere and ways that we react to life that just seem to be part of our “personality.” Today, we understand that all of these automatic behaviors, feelings, and thoughts are related to specific activity in our brains. Recent research suggests that, in a very literal sense, our brains were built on a foundation of popularity. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring links between pupillary response and depression following trauma, predictors of postdeployment functioning among combat veterans, the developmental course of borderline personality disorder, and reasoning among delusion-prone individuals.
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A Plan For Raising Brilliant Kids, According To Science
NPR: "Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?" When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a "Just because." You can explain: "Red is for stop and green is for go." Or, you can turn the question back to her and help her figure out the answer with plenty of encouragement. No parent, teacher or caregiver has the time or patience to respond perfectly to all of the many, many, many opportunities like these that come along. But a new book, Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children, is designed to get us thinking about the magnitude of these moments. Read the whole story: NPR
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Want to slow down your aging process? Mind-set can be key, oldest seniors say.
The Washington Post: Wilhelmina Delco learned to swim at 80. Harold Berman is in his 67th year practicing law. Mildred Walston spent 76 years on the job at a candy company. And brothers Joe and Warren Barger are finding new spots in their respective homes for the gold medals they’ve just earned in track-and-field events at the National Senior Games. These octogenarians and nonagenarians may not be widely known outside their local communities, but just as with their more famous peers — think Carl Reiner, Betty White, Dr. Ruth (Westheimer) and Tony Bennett — the thread that binds them is not the year on their birth certificate but the way they live. ...
