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Insiders and Outsiders
When social groups interact, notions of “insiders” and “outsiders” develop. Using a variety of approaches – psychological, physiological, and neurobiological – Valerie Purdie-Vaughns seeks to understand relationships between social groups and reduce intergroup bias and conflict. In particular, she investigates how minority and majority groups interact, focusing on experiments that closely mirror real-world scenarios. For instance, several recent studies have examined how the anxiety of feeling stigmatized can lead to dysregulated eating and psychological distress.
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Luxury Shopping, from the Other Side of the Register
The New Yorker: This holiday season, I’m working in sales at a store in a giant luxury mall, just outside Philadelphia and near one of the richest Zip Codes in the United States. Major employers in the area include defense contractors and pharmacy conglomerates. Every day, I park my run-down car among BMWs and hybrids. The mall’s interior is decked out for Christmas: light-studded garlands are strung in the eaves; colossal reindeer grace the entrances like sphinxes; security officers zoom by on Segways. The mall rats who hover around the doors smoking cigarettes wear brands of designer jeans I’ve only ever heard about in songs.
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Let Them Throw Cake: Messy Kids May Be Faster Learners
TIME: Parents who constantly find themselves wiping food off the high chair, the table, the walls, the ceiling and even the dog after a meal should take heart. A new study suggests that in making all that mess, their child is learning. Researchers from the University of Iowa (UI) studied how 16 month olds learn the words for non-solid objects—things as oatmeal or applesauce or milk—that infants generally take longer to learn and found that those who messed with the substance the most learned the words more quickly. The kids who had really got their hands—and sometimes the walls or floors—dirty, seemed to be the ones who understood the differences in texture or viscosity better.
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Alleged Perils Of Left-Handedness Don’t Always Hold Up
NPR: I recently stumbled upon a description of research out of Yale that suggested there was a link between left-handedness and psychotic disorders like schizophrenia. Forty percent of those with psychotic disorders are lefties, one of the researchers . That startled me. Only about 10 percent of people in the general population are left-handed. I'm one of them. I've often read that I'm going to die earlier. Also, I'm bad with scissors. And now, it seemed, I'm at high risk for mental illness. Was my hand preference a lifelong curse? The short answer: No. After getting both my hands on the , I found that the work, while intriguing, falls far short of being conclusive.
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The Emotions That Prosecutors Elicit to Make Jurors Vote Guilty
Pacific Standard: In May, an off-duty British Army soldier named Lee Rigby was murdered, in broad daylight, in what is likely the most incredibly brazen and baffling act of violence the neighborhood of Woolwich, London, had ever seen. Two men purposely ran over Rigby with their car, then got out and attacked him with knives and meat cleavers until he died.
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Millennial Searchers
The New York Times: FOR Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who wrote the best-selling book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the call to answer life’s ultimate question came early. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.” But Frankl would have none of it. “Sir, if this is so,” he cried, jumping out of his chair, “then what can be the meaning of life?” The teenage Frankl made this statement nearly a hundred years ago — but he had more in common with today’s young people than we might assume.
