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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring: distress, worry, and responses to the Ebola crisis; anxiety-linked attentional bias and mitigation of threat; and neural underpinnings of repetitive negative thinking in autism spectrum disorders.
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Why Your Sense Of Smell Is Better Than You Might Think
NPR: Smell, the thinking goes, is not our strongest sense. Our lowly noses are eclipsed by our ability to see the world around us, hear the sound of music and feel the touch of a caress. Even animals, we're taught, have a far more acute sense of smell than we do. But one scientist argues the idea of an inferior sense of smell stems from a 19th-century myth. When neuroscientist John McGann at Rutgers started comparing the sense of smell in rodents to what was known about the human sense of smell, he had an epiphany. "Actually we have a really excellent sense of smell," he says.
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Boredom Is Good for You
The Atlantic: Boredom has, paradoxically, become quite interesting to academics lately. The International Interdisciplinary Boredom Conference gathered humanities scholars in Warsaw for the fifth time in April. In early May, its less scholarly forerunner, London’s Boring Conference, celebrated seven years of delighting in tedium. At this event, people flock to talks about toast, double yellow lines, sneezing, and vending-machine sounds, among other snooze-inducing topics. What, exactly, is everybody studying? One widely accepted psychological definition of boredom is “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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How Much Do Toddlers Learn From Play?
The Wall Street Journal: Any preschool teacher will tell you that young children learn through play, and some of the best known preschool programs make play central, too. One of the most famous approaches began after World War II around the northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia and developed into a world-wide movement. The Reggio Emilia programs, as well as other model preschools like the Child Study Centers at Berkeley and Yale, encourage young children to freely explore a rich environment with the encouragement and help of attentive adults. ...
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How to Get the Wealthy to Donate
The New York Times: Wealthy people are selfish jerks. So are their children. That is the implication, at least, of a batch of recent psychological studies. In a 2015 study, for example, preschoolers were told that they had earned enough tokens for “a really great prize.” They could keep the tokens for themselves or share the tokens with children at a local hospital who were too sick to come to the lab. Children from wealthier families kept more tokens for themselves. Likewise, in 2010, researchers found that college students’ willingness to give to charity was tied to their wealth: Students from well-off families thought people should donate a smaller percentage of their annual income.
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MEAN DRUNK? ALCOHOL PERSONALITY STUDY SAYS MAYBE NOT
Newsweek: You may think you’re a mean drunk. Or a funny drunk. Or even a mellow drunk. But do other people see you that way? A new study by psychologists at the University of Missouri found that many of the mood changes we experience as a result of alcohol are not always so apparent to others—despite what we may think. Rachel Winograd, clinical psychologist at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health, and colleagues wanted to understand the discrepancy between how we see ourselves and how others see us as the mood-altering effects of alcohol set in. So they conducted a study to see just how obvious alcohol-induced personality changes were to outside observers. ...
