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Get It Over With: People Choose More Difficult Tasks to Get Jobs Done More Quickly
Most of us are well-acquainted with procrastination, but new research suggests that “pre-crastination”—hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible—may also be a common phenomenon.
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Forgiving a Wrong May Actually Make It Easier to Forget
We’re often told to “forgive and forget” the wrongs that we suffer -- it turns out that there may be some scientific truth behind the common saying. A study from researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland shows that the details of a transgression are more susceptible to forgetting when that transgression has been forgiven. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “It is well established that learning to forgive others can have positive benefits for an individual’s physical and mental health,” says Saima Noreen, lead author of the study.
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Having a Sense of Purpose May Add Years to Your Life
Feeling that you have a sense of purpose in life may help you live longer, no matter what your age, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research has clear implications for promoting positive aging and adult development, says lead researcher Patrick Hill of Carleton University in Canada: “Our findings point to the fact that finding a direction for life, and setting overarching goals for what you want to achieve can help you actually live longer, regardless of when you find your purpose,” says Hill.
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Entering Adulthood in a Recession Linked to Lower Narcissism Later in Life
People who enter adulthood during hard economic times have been found to have a much different view of themselves than those who come of age in prosperous times.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Learning and Memory Consolidation Processes of Attention-Bias Modification in Anxious and Nonanxious Individuals Rany Abend, Daniel S. Pine, Nathan A. Fox, and Yair Bar-Haim Attention-bias-modification (ABM) paradigms are a type of computerized cognitive-training intervention that reduces attentional bias toward threatening stimuli. Research on ABM has tended to focus on the attentional changes produced by these programs rather than on the learning and consolidation processes that occur during training.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Don't Do It Again: Directed Forgetting of Habits Gesine Dreisbach and Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml Can directed forgetting be used to eliminate habits? Participants completed a directed-forgetting task where they associated words with either a left or a right button press. Participants were told to remember or to forget the original associations before being reshown the words. In the new presentation, half of the word/button-press associations were compatible with those in the original presentation and half were not.