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Cash, compassion and morality
The Baltimore Sun: I was a passenger in a car on Thursday morning, and we stopped for a fill-up at a gas station on North Charles Street in Baltimore, a block up from North Avenue. I was on the phone while the driver purchased and pumped the gasoline. A young, male panhandler tried to make eye contact with me through the passenger's side window, but I avoided being drawn into his tractor beam. Some panhandlers appear broken and docile, some seem impatient and even angry; some have yellow heroin eyes or some other form of medicated stare. This one seemed a little frustrated by a series of rush-hour rejections.
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Kindness rewards the giver, too
The Columbus Dispatch: Among the benefits of kindness is the positive psychological gain that occurs for both the giver and receiver. When we see someone else help another person, it gives us a good feeling, which in turn causes us to go out and do something altruistic. Research has shown that generosity and kindness are contagious. American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” Why do generosity and kindness have a positive psychological effect on people? Researchers think that kindness gives people a strong sense that they are doing something that matters.
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5 habits of highly successful dieters
CNN Health: Eat less, exercise more. That's the recipe for losing weight, and we all know it by heart. So if we want to get slimmer, and we know the formula, then why can't we do it? Commitment is important -- in fact, it's essential -- but it's only the beginning. The key to successful dieting is bridging the gap between what you want to do and actually doing it. The desire is there; you just need a plan. The scientifically proven tactics on these two pages will help you do just that. I say that with confidence -- not only as a social psychologist who studies motivation, but also as someone who has benefited from these tricks firsthand.
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Understanding Brain Functioning
Brenda Milner greatly expanded our understanding of brain functioning through her study of the cognitive deficits associated with temporal and frontal lobe injury. Her most famous work involved a series of experiments with patient H.M., a patient who had most of his medial temporal lobe removed in order to control his severe epilepsy. Although the surgery was successful in controlling his seizures it left him with anterograde amnesia. Milner’s experiments with H.M. not only identified specific brain areas responsible for memory functioning, but also indicated that the brain had more than one memory acquisition system.
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Great Results in the Psych Lab—But Do They Hold Up in the Field?
How well do findings in the psychology lab generalize to real life? This criterion—“external validity”—is probably the most important for experimental psychology. So it was good news when, in 1999, Craig A. Anderson and his colleagues compared laboratory and field research on 38 topics in 21 meta-analyses (or analyses of numerous other studies), and found a lot of agreement between the results of the two. Greg Mitchell, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia School of Law, wanted to know if these findings hold up in a bigger sample—and whether there were differences among different kinds of psychological research.
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Driving Home the Point
When Haneen Saqer, Ewart de Visser, and Jonathan Strohl arrived at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia to talk about the perils of distracted driving, they thought they would be addressing a group of 100 students. Instead, they faced an auditorium of 700 students along with reporters from ABC News and NPR. After all, the trio — who are members of the George Mason University student group Distractions n' Driving (DnD) — had just come to share their graduate research in Human Factors and Applied Cognition. Watch coverage of the program from this ABC 7 News Clip: “We were a bit overwhelmed, but we were prepared,” de Visser says. “The kids really liked it because it was very engaging.
