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Driven to Worry, and to Procrastinate
The New York Times: SINCE time began, it seems, people have been putting off till tomorrow what they could have done today — berating themselves and inconveniencing others in the process. It wouldn’t be a problem except that time eventually runs out. “You may delay, but time will not,” said Benjamin Franklin. In the world of work, procrastination has “expensive and visible costs,” said Rory Vaden, a corporate trainer, who points to research showing that the average employee admits to wasting two hours a day on nonwork tasks. People know that procrastination hurts themselves, others and their work, so why do they do it?
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El estrés cambia la forma en la que se toman decisiones
ABC Salud: El estrés cambia la forma en la que se toman decisiones, alterando la manera en la que las personas sopesan riesgos y beneficios. Así lo apunta un estudio de llevado a cabo por un equipo de investigadores de la Universidad de California del Sur (EE.UU.), cuyos resultados, publicados en el último número de Current Directions in Psychological Science, revelan que el estrés hace que la gente se centre más en lo positivo.
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Perfectionism, Goal Appraisals, and Distress in Students
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling in Washington, DC. Watch. Watch Gordon L. Flett from York University, Canada and Taryn Nepon of York University, Canada present their research at the 23rd APS Annual Convention in Washington, DC. This study examined perfectionism, goal cognitions, and distress in 95 students. Participants completed the Goal Systems Assessment Battery, along with measures of perfectionism, anxiety, and depression. Socially prescribed perfectionism and perfectionistic thoughts were associated with goal-related self-criticism and negative arousal. Self-oriented perfectionism predicted self-criticism and negative arousal for academic goals.
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Who’s in the Know? To a Preschooler, the Person Doing the Pointing
If you want a preschooler to get the point, point. That’s a lesson that can be drawn from a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. As part of their investigation of how small children know what other people know, the authors, Carolyn Palmquist and Vikram K. Jaswal of the University of Virginia, found they were able to mislead preschoolers with the simple introduction of a pointing gesture. “Children were willing to attribute knowledge to a person solely based on the gesture they used to convey the information,” says Palmquist.
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In the Brain, Broken Hearts Hurt Like Broken Bones
TIME: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can hurt just as much. Indeed, according to converging evidence reported in a new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, physical and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain. Naomi Eisenberger, co-director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UCLA, published the first brain-imaging paper revealing the overlap in 2003. She had been studying participants’ reactions to being rejected by other players (actually just a computer opponent) in a video game.
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Imagining The Future Of Psychotherapy
WBUR Public Radio: The talking cure has come a long way since Sigmund Freud had women lying on his couch and free-associating several times a week. Today, there are a wide variety of scientifically-supported interventions for a wide variety of problems. But a heated discussion among major players in the psychotherapy world suggests that the standard treatments of today aren’t likely to be the standard treatments of tomorrow. I’m a clinical psychologist myself, with one foot in the world of clinical practice and one foot in the world of academic research.
