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Can science explain why I’m a pessimist?
BBC: Debbie and Trudi are identical twins. They have much in common, except that Trudi is cheerful and optimistic while Debbie is prone to bouts of profound depression. It is likely that her depression was triggered by a major life event, though the twins have different views as to what that event might have been. By studying a group of identical twins like Debbie and Trudi, Prof Tim Spector, based at St Thomas' hospital in London, has been trying to answer fundamental questions about how our personality is formed. Why are some people more positive about life than others? Read the whole story: BBC
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Buying Behavior Can Be Swayed by Cultural Mindset
There are some combinations that just go well together: Milk and cookies, eggs and bacon, pancakes and maple syrup. But new research reveals that people with individualistic mindsets differ from their collectivist counterparts in ascribing value to those perfect combinations. The collection of new studies, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, demonstrate that people with collectivist mindsets tend to value the relationships between items more than the particular items themselves.
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Low self-control makes you selfless
The Times of India: When people face the choice of sacrificing time and energy for a person that they love or taking a self-centered route, their first impulse is to think of others, a new research has suggested. Lead researcher Francesca Righetti of VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said that for decades psychologists have assumed that the first impulse is selfish and that it takes self-control to behave in a pro-social manner, which she said they did not believe that this was true in every context, and especially not in close relationships.
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The Unintended Consequences of Company Wellness Penalties
The Daily Beast: More and more companies are saying yes—and not only can your company encourage you to get healthy, it can punish you for being overweight, usually by raising your health-care premiums. That’s right—being unhealthy could start digging into your paycheck. About 18 percent of workplace wellness programs include some kind of penalty for employees who don’t get healthy—and a 2010 survey by Hewitt Associates found that percentage is expected to rise to 47 percent by 2015. But three new studies on workplace wellness incentives have found that employees aren’t taking new penalty-laden policies lightly.
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Connect With Someone In A Second Flat
Prevention: Faking a grin reduces stress, but research recently published in Psychological Science reveals that people respond to the real thing instinctively, often reacting with true smiles of their own subconsciously. UK researchers found that people responded to genuine smiles in less than 200 milliseconds (the fastest we can process an expression and respond with a voluntary one) more often than when their partner put on a polite grin. Although the researchers classified any smile involving the eye muscles as genuine during analysis of 48 videotaped one-on-one conversations between adults of the same sex, the real markers are internal.
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For Kids This Summer, How Safe Is Too Safe?
NPR: But does the child lose anything from playing it too safe? Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is a professor of psychology at Temple University, and she says, sometimes, yes. KATHY HIRSH-PASEK: Look, I don't mind changing from wood to plastic, but I do think that we have to let kids climb a little bit higher because we learn a tremendous amount from getting that skinned knee. And we become successes not just by succeeding but sometimes by failing. SHEIR: What about those who say that our children's safety is the most important thing, as in, you know, sometimes it's more than a skinned knee or a bruised elbow.
