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Meaningless Accelerating Scores Yield Better Performance
From typing to exercising, racking up meaningless digital points can serve as an effective motivator, as long as the scores are accelerating.
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Microaggressions?
Aeon: Across college campuses and the corporate landscape, a big idea has taken hold: the notion that microaggressions – subtle but offensive comments or actions directed at minorities or other powerless people – can lower performance, lead to ostracism, increase anxiety, and sometimes cause so much psychological pain that the recipient might even commit suicide. Yet despite the good intentions and passionate embrace of this idea, there is scant real-world evidence that microaggression is a legitimate psychological concept, that it represents unconscious (or implicit) prejudice, that intervention for it works, or even that alleged victims are seriously damaged by these under-the-radar acts.
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Cracking the Popularity Code
Scientific American: We live in an age obsessed with popularity. Adults spend more and more of their time thinking, and behaving, like high school students. In a new book — called, yes, “Popular” — the psychologist Mitch Prinstein explores popularity with a scientist’s eye. Prinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that there are, in fact, two types of popularity and that we, as a culture, have settled on the more dysfunctional type. There is, he says, a better way. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Puppy Love! How Baby Animal Photos Could Help Your Marriage
Live Science: That "squeee!" you feel when you look at pictures of cute puppies or bunnies might be good for your love life. A new study finds that looking at baby-animal photos may increase couples' levels of satisfaction with their relationships. Researchers found that study participants who looked at the photos of their spouses paired with photos of cute animals or with other pleasant images over a few weeks seemed to see their partners in a more positive light by the end of the study, compared with people who looked at the photos of their spouses paired with other images over the same period.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring attention bias modification, emotion differentiation and depressive symptoms, episodic future thinking as an intervention to reduce delay discounting, and the role of hippocampal volume in predicting adolescent depression.
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Men Can Be So Hormonal
The New York Times: “Does being over 40 make you feel like half the man you used to be?” Ads like that have led to a surge in the number of men seeking to boost their testosterone. The Food and Drug Administration reports that prescriptions for testosterone supplements have risen to 2.3 million from 1.3 million in just four years. There is such a condition as “low-T,” or hypogonadism, which can cause fatigue and diminished sex drive, and it becomes more common as men age. But according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, half of the men taking prescription testosterone don’t have a deficiency. Many are just tired and want a lift. But they may not be doing themselves any favors.
