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Know Thy Avatar: Good and Evil in the Gaming World
The Huffington Post: The 2013 Ben Stiller film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a remake of a 1947 Danny Kaye movie of the same name, which was itself based on a popular James Thurber story, first published in The New Yorker in 1939. The enduring appeal of this tale reflects the human urge to try on another identity, to be someone else for a time, to play act. Walter Mitty is an ordinary, boring fellow going about his very ordinary day, but in his rich heroic daydreams he is everything from assassin to fighter pilot to ER surgeon extraordinaire. It's all good fun. But is it possible that such complete immersion in novel and extraordinary identities might have unintended consequences?
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Why baby talk is good for your baby
The Washington Post: The more parents exaggerate vowels and raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, the more the babies babble, new research shows. Common advice to new parents is that the more words babies hear, the faster their vocabulary grows. The new findings show that what spurs early language development isn’t so much the quantity of words as the style of speech and social context in which speech occurs. Researchers examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies.
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In Life and Business, Learning to Be Ethical
The New York Times: LOTS of New Year’s resolutions are being made — and no doubt ignored — at this time of year. But there’s one that’s probably not even on many lists and should be: Act more ethically. Most people, if pressed, would acknowledge that they could use an ethical tuneup. Maybe last year they fudged some numbers at work. Dented a car and failed to leave a note. Remained silent when a friend made a racist joke. The problem, research shows, is that how we think we’re going to act when faced with a moral decision and how we really do act are often vastly different.
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Effective Mentoring Stems From Workplace Climate
Mentoring a less experienced colleague -- and doing it effectively -- can be a demanding task, especially when deadlines are looming. The relationship is a delicate one, and trying to foster a working dynamic that is productive but also engaging is a skill that requires practice. New findings suggest that how your company operates as a whole can have significant bearing on whether the mentor/protégé bond flourishes or flounders. That is, the overall tenor of the workplace environment influences the give and take of the relationship.
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Extraordinary Altruism: Who Gives A Kidney To A Stranger?
I have a colleague who would not be alive today if it were not for a complete stranger, who volunteered to give her a kidney. Her kidneys were failing, and she would not have survived for long. Now she is healthy, and has been for some years. So I understand in a personal way that living kidney donation is an extraordinary gift, a far-too-rare act of pure altruism. Yet I have not offered to make the same gift of my kidney. I have a friend who did, who donated one of her kidneys to a stranger, just out of the goodness of her heart. I admired her, but it made me nervous when she did it, for the same reason that it makes me nervous now. What if something goes wrong?
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research from Psychological Science: Task Relevance Induces Momentary Changes in the Functional Visual Field During Reading Johanna K. Kaakinen and Jukka Hyönä Research has shown that people zoom in on task-relevant information in text. The authors examined whether a person's functional visual field changes as a function of task relevance by tracking participants' eye movements as they read a large piece of text about different countries. Before reading, participants were instructed to imagine they were going to move to one of the countries described in the text.
