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Making Time Stand Still. Awesome.
Check out this photograph. That’s aurora borealis, or the northern lights, as seen from the upper regions of Norway earlier this week. This spectacular display was fueled by one of the most potent solar storms in a decade. One can only imagine what it must have been like to actually witness this event. It must have been truly awesome. I know. I know. Awesome is a tired, overused word these days, when everything from breakfast to a pair of sneakers can be described as awesome. Awesome is no longer connected to awe, that rare and overwhelming emotion inspired by vast and moving events.
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The Amygdala And Fear Are Not The Same Thing
In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated - displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of black people. This link between the amygdala and fear – especially a fear of others unlike us, has gone too far, not only in pop culture, but also in psychological science, say the authors of a new paper which will be published in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Indeed, many experiments have found that the amygdala is active when people are afraid.
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People in Power Feel Taller
Scientific American: It’s known that taller people tend to have more jobs with more authority—and higher salaries. But there’s a flip side—the more powerful a person is, the taller he or she feels. The researchers who investigated this phenomenon were inspired by the BP chairman’s comment after the oil spill about the “small people.” There are many such metaphors—think “big man on campus.” Could these metaphors influence—or reflect—reality? Might powerful people actually overestimate how tall they are? Read the full story: Scientific American
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Does Technology Affect Happiness?
The New York Times: As young people spend more time on computers, smartphones and other devices, researchers are asking how all that screen time and multitasking affects children’s and teenagers’ ability to focus and learn — even drive cars. A study from Stanford University, published Wednesday, wrestles with a new question: How is technology affecting their happiness and emotional development?
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Why Religion Makes Only Some of Us Happy
msnbc.com: Religious people tend to feel better about themselves and their lives, but a new study finds that this benefit may only hold in places where everyone else is religious, too. According to the new study of almost 200,000 people in 11 European countries , people who are religious have higher self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than the non-religious only in countries where belief in religion is common. In more secular societies, the religious and the non-religious are equally well-off.
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Writing Tip: Better “You” Than “I”
You are a sick man…you are a spiteful man. That’s not the first line of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground; Dostoyevsky used the first person: “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man.” Do readers respond differently to stories depending upon whether they are narrated from the perspective of ‘‘you’’ or ‘‘I’’? Recent research published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology offers some tips for writers who want to impact their readers. Tad T. Brunye and coauthors chose eight passages from two novels and created a first- and second-person version of each passage. The researchers asked undergraduate students to read one set of four passages written from either an “I” or “you” perspective.
