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Change Your Hand, Change Your Mood!
ABC Radio Brisbane: Do you have anger management problems? Do you yell at other drivers on the road or feel a swell of rage when people jump queues? Help may be at hand. Dr Thomas Denson from the University of New South Wales, School of Psychology says practicing skills with your non-dominant hand can help exercise your self control muscle. Afternoons presenter Kelly Higgins-Devine spoke with Dr Denson. Listen to the story: ABC Radio Brisbane
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Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness
The New York Times: In the film version of “All the President’s Men,” when Robert Redford, playing the journalist Bob Woodward, is struggling to unravel the Watergate conspiracy, an anonymous source advises him to “follow the money.” It’s a good rule of thumb for understanding the behavior of politicians. But following the money leads you astray if you’re trying to understand voters. Self-interest, political scientists have found, is a surprisingly weak predictor of people’s views on specific issues. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens.
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Does your mind wander while performing daily tasks?
From CBC News: If you're having trouble reading the entirety of this article without your mind wandering off, it might actually be a good thing. Just stay with us for a moment. According to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, people whose minds wander during minor tasks have a greater amount of working memory. University of Wisconsin-Madison News describes working memory as "a sort of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously." The report was written by the university's Daniel Levinson and Richard Davidson, as well as Dr. Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.
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Shivering Liberals, Parched Conservatives
Imagine you’re reading a newspaper and you come across an article about a woman lost in a nearby forest. She had hiked several miles to a small cabin for a bit of escape from her stressful work life, and a freak spring snowstorm dropped eight inches of powder overnight as the temperature plummeted. This forest is difficult to navigate under the best of conditions, and the woman is a fairly inexperienced hiker. Her family and friends are concerned because she didn’t pack food or water for a long stay, and she dressed for mild weather. Rangers are combing the forest. How do you feel about this woman as you read her story?
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What was B.F. Skinner really like? A study parses his traits
March 20th marks the birthday of famed behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, who would have turned 108 today. Besides Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner was the most famous and perhaps the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. But his own “radical behaviorism”—the idea that behavior is caused solely by environmental factors, never by thoughts or feelings—made him a magnet of controversy, which grew even more intense with the publication of his best-known book, Beyond Freedom & Dignity.
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An Unconventional Solution to Social Ills
Social scientists have hard job, and it’s possible they have a harder job than engineers and physicists. At the very least, Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich in Switzerland thinks that they’re further behind. “Today we are understanding a lot about our physical world and about our universe; also, we have invested a lot in understanding our environment,” says Helbing, who is Scientific Coordinator of FuturITC. “But so far, there’s a lack of understanding of social economic systems.” Social systems are hard to understand because they’re immensely complicated.
