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2013 APS Award Address: Diane F. Halpern
Our government is broken. Negativity toward Congress is at an all-time high, with hyperpartisanship as the new bigotry in the US. In this address, Halpern will use the lens of psychological science to view the problem and to suggest corrective actions that we can take to reduce it.
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2013 APS Award Address: Elaine F. Walker
Research on the origins of serious mental illness has benefited greatly from advances in developmental neuroscience. With these advances, we now have a clearer picture of the complex interplay between environmental factors and brain development. Contemporary research on the origins of serious mental illness has drawn on this knowledge base and yielded important findings about the confluence of factors that give rise to mental disorders. This presentation will describe the major trends in these new findings and their implications for future perspectives on mental health.
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Why College Students Make Better Decisions Than Intelligence Agents
Yahoo: Who would you trust with the lives of hundreds of people: federal intelligence agents or a bunch of college students? At Cornell University, psychologist Valerie Reyna wanted to test whether intelligence agents were susceptible to a type of decision-making bias people accrue as they get older. It's called fuzzy thinking. As our life experience grows more robust, we tend to make decisions off of gists, rather than analytical lines of thought. Read the whole story: Yahoo
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Booze, Binging and the Devil You Don’t Know
Imagine this scenario. You are meeting your boyfriend at a restaurant, intending to break up with him. You know this conversation is going to be tough, but you really don’t know what his reaction will be. He could end up sobbing, or shouting, or he could just sit there in uncomfortable silence. You arrive early and order a whiskey—a double—to steady your nerves. Will the whiskey have its desired effect? Drinkers clearly expect that alcohol will dampen the effects of stress—they often drink for precisely that reason—but in fact this dynamic is poorly understood.
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To Savor the Flavor, Perform a Short Ritual First
Birthday celebrations often follow a formula, including off-key singing, making a birthday wish while blowing out candles, and the ceremonial cutting of the birthday cake. New research suggests that this ritual not only makes the
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Society for Affective Science Inaugural Conference
A new society has been formed -- The Society for Affective Science. Its mission is to foster basic and applied research in the variety of fields that study affect, broadly defined. The SAS inaugural conference will be April 24-26, 2014 in Washington DC. This will be a theoretically/methodologically diverse, student-friendly conference that will provide a forum for cross-cutting work in emotion, stress, and many of the other topics that fall under the broad umbrella of affective science. For more information, and to get early-bird registration rates, see the society website: society-for-affective-science.org. For questions, contact [email protected].
