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How to Cope When Everything Is Changing
How do you make plans when it’s impossible to make plans? The ground beneath our feet is constantly shifting. Planning for anything more than a week out can feel futile — almost silly — since no one knows what the next week, much less the next month, will bring. A surge in coronavirus cases in your area? More lockdowns? Worrying about natural disasters? And concerns about health and financial well-being make matters even worse. “The questions are endless. And the answers are always changing,” said Nick Tasler, an organizational psychologist and the author of “Ricochet: What To Do When Change Happens To You.” “One day the W.H.O. recommends this, and the next day the C.D.C.
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Recalling Memories From A Distance Changes How Your Brain Works And Helps You Excel In Your Career
New research shows recalling memories from a third-person perspective changes how your brain processes them. When you take the third-person point of view, you are the narrator of job obstacles and career disappointments. The practice of self-distancing, however, gives you the view of an observer, widening your perspective and helping you see the bigger picture—the water you’re swimming in. And it reveals solutions to problems and possibilities to work obstacles so you can scale them and enjoy career success. ... Previous Studies On Self-Distancing Research shows silently referring to ourselves by name instead as “I,” gives us psychological distance from the primitive parts of our brain.
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As the Pandemic Erodes Grad Student Mental Health, Academics Sound the Alarm
As the academic year kicks into gear, Dagny Deutchman is navigating a new role. The second-year psychology graduate student is serving as one of Montana State University’s first department-level “graduate student wellness champions”—a position in which she hopes to foster dialogue about mental health issues. “Academic culture can in some ways be pretty toxic,” she says. “Change has to come from the top down, but it also has to come from within.” The new position comes at an opportune time, with mental health issues on the rise amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In a survey of roughly 4000 U.S.-based STEM Ph.D.
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How Practical Wisdom Helps Us Cope with Radical Uncertainty
APS Member/Author: Barry Schwartz The stress of uncertain pain outsizes the stress of certain pain. These were the results of a 2016 study, published long before the uncertainty of Pandemic 2020 was running the world show. In the study, participants with a 50 percent chance of receiving a shock were more stressed than those with a one hundred percent chance of receiving a shock. In other words, it wasn’t just the possibility of a shock that caused stress—it was its uncertainty.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on reward effects on pain discrimination, delay of gratification, alcohol use, equity in college courses, spatial hearing in blind people, spatial navigation, effects of repetition on illusions of truth, and selective attention.
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The Good, the Bad and the ‘Radically Dishonest’
In this age of trolls and bots and digital impostors, words like “crank” and “bully” seem impossibly antiquated, like labels from the black-and-white TV era. “Scoundrel” almost qualifies as a term of endearment — culturally insensitive, for the purveyors of disinformation who parade with grim delight in the virtual public square. A more precise language is called for, a typology of lying and cheating that includes everyone, and sharpens the boundary between garden variety corner-cutting and deeper personality problems. Psychology is here to help.
