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Science Learning Easier When Students Put Down Textbooks
The Epoch Times: Put down those science textbooks and work at recalling information from memory. That’s the shorthand take-away message of new research from Purdue University that says practicing memory retrieval boosts science learning far better than elaborate study methods. Read the whole story: The Epoch Times
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New Research From Psychological Science
Controlling the Unconscious: Attentional Task Sets Modulate Subliminal Semantic and Visuomotor Processes Differentially Ulla Martens, Ulrich Ansorge, and Markus Kiefer Unconscious processing can be affected by how a person's attention is focused. Researchers gave volunteers a semantic induction task (i.e., classifying an object as living or nonliving) or a perceptual induction task (i.e., classifying an object as round or elongated) to engage their attention in different ways.
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Why Having Kids Is Foolish
TIME: All parents know that having kids is a blessing — except when it's a nightmare of screaming fits, diapers, runny noses, wars over bedtimes and homework and clothes. To say nothing of bills too numerous to list. Economists have argued in the past that having kids is an economically silly investment; after all, it's cheaper to hire end-of-life care than to raise a child. Now comes new research showing that having kids is not only financially foolish but that kids literally make parents delusional. Researchers have known for some time that parents with minors who live at home report feeling calm significantly less often than than people who don't live with young children.
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Mate Idealization Makes for Happy Early Marriage
They say that love is blind. And that’s probably for the best. Because a new study shows that people who greatly idealize their spouses have the happiest marriages. For the first few years, anyway. The research appears in the journal Psychological Science. Karen Hopkin of Scientific American's 60-Second Science reports that people who had seemingly unrealistic expectations of their spouses were nonetheless happier than more realistic mates in a marriage's early years. Listen to the podcast here.
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Joy of parenthood is a fantasy: Psychologists say cost of children forces mothers and fathers to convince themselves it’s worthwhile
The Daily Mail: Most parents say they wouldn’t have it any other way. Children cause them financial hardship, eat up their time and cause untold worry... but mums and dads insist they are worth every penny, wrinkle and grey hair. But according to scientists, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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We make better decisions when we gotta go
MSNBC: In addition to making you walk funny and drop your keys five or six times while trying to get inside your house, a full bladder may actually do something useful: help you make better decisions. According to an upcoming study in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands performed experiments on more than 500 college students to determine if the inhibitory signals sent to a full bladder would “spill over” into other inhibitory responses, such as holding out for a larger monetary reward rather than going with a smaller immediate one. Read the whole story: MSNBC
