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Plan Your Way to Less Stress, More Happiness
TIME: A recent survey by psychologist and self-help author Robert Epstein found that 25% of our happiness hinges on how well we're able to manage stress. The next logical question is, of course, how best can we reduce our stress? Epstein's data, which he presented last month at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Los Angeles, was intended to help answer that question. It involved 3,000 participants in the U.S. and 29 other countries, who responded to an online questionnaire.
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Violent Video Games Linked to Increased Aggression
MSN Health: Violent video games trigger aggression among those who play them, according to a new University of Missouri study. Such players showed more hostility because their brains had become less responsive, or desensitized, to violence -- a response that the researchers linked to increased aggression. "From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence," study co-author Bruce Bartholow, an associate professor of psychology at UM College of Arts and Sciences, said in a university news release. Read more: MSN Health
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How death affects life
Examiner.com How you think about death affects how you behave in life. That's the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science During the study, researchers had people either think about death in the abstract or in a specific, personal way and found that people who thought specifically about their own death were more likely to demonstrate concern for society by donating blood. Read more at: Examiner.com
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Blanks for the Memories
The Wall Street Journal: A rowdy cousin … an Eeyore T-shirt … a dog-shaped balloon. Why we remember some scenes from early childhood and forget others has long intrigued scientists—as well as parents striving to create happy memories for their kids. One of the biggest mysteries: why most people can't seem to recall anything before age 3 or 4. Now, researchers in Canada have demonstrated that some young children can remember events from even before age 2—but those memories are fragile, with many vanishing by about age 10, according to a study in the journal Child Development this month. Read more at : The Wall Street Journal
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Kids own up to ownership
ScienceNews: Young children are possessed by possessions. Preschoolers argue about what belongs to whom with annoying regularity, a habit that might suggest limited appreciation of what it means to own something. But it’s actually just the opposite, psychologist Ori Friedman of the University of Waterloo in Canada reported on May 28 at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting. At ages 4 and 5, youngsters value a person’s ownership rights — say, to a crayon — far more strongly than adults do, Friedman and psychology graduate student Karen Neary found.
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Researchers say math anxiety starts young
The Washington Post: Math problems make more than a few students — and even teachers — sweat, but new brain research is providing insights into the earliest causes of the anxiety so often associated with mathematics. Mathematics anxiety is more than just disliking math, experts say; someone with math anxiety feels negative emotions when engaging in an activity that requires numerical or math skills. In one forthcoming study, simply suggesting to college students that they would be asked to take a math test triggered a stress response in the hypothalamus of students with high math anxiety. Read more: The Washington Post
