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Dire Messages About Global Warming Can Backfire, Study Shows
Scientists and environmental advocates may have more success convincing people about the dangers of global warming if they communicate those risks in less apocalyptic ways, research suggests.
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Being Faced With Gender Stereotypes Makes Women Less Likely to Take Financial Risks
Research suggests that stereotypes about women and risk taking can influence how women actually make financial decisions.
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Your View of Personal Goals Can Affect Your Relationships
How you think about your goals—whether it's to improve yourself or to do better than others—can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People with "mastery goals" want to improve themselves. Maybe they want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe loop. On the other hand, people with what psychologists call "performance goals" are trying to outperform others—to get a better grade than a friend or be Employee of the Year.
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Sleep Makes Your Memories Stronger
As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Sleep is making memories stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who cowrote the review with Elizabeth A.
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New Research From Psychological Science
On "Feeling Right" in Cultural Contexts: How Person-Culture Match Affects Self-Esteem and Subjective Well-Being C. Ashley Fulmer, Michele J. Gelfand, Arie W. Kruglanski, Chu Kim-Prieto, Ed Diener, Antonio Pierro, and E. Tory Higgins Due to work requirements or as part of educational programs, individuals can find themselves living in cultures very different from their own. How does the interaction of culture with an individual's personality affect their self-esteem and well-being?
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The Mind Uses Syntax to Interpret Actions
Most people are familiar with the concept that sentences have syntax. A verb, a subject, and an object come together in predictable patterns. But actions have syntax, too; when we watch someone else do something, we assemble their actions to mean something, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "There are oceans and oceans of work on how we understand languages and how we interpret the things other people say," says Matthew Botvinick of Princeton University, who cowrote the paper with his colleagues Kachina Allen, Steven Ibara, Amy Seymour, and Natalia Cordova.
