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Study: Opportunities in Young Adulthood Linked to Later Narcissism
The Atlantic: There has been much debate over which generation, exactly, is the “Me” generation. Is it Millennials? Is it Baby Boomers? People have been taking selfies for pretty much as long as there have been cameras, after all. And painting them before that. There have always been and will always be narcissists, and, seemingly, we will always be horrified by their entitlement. But if there are generational differences in narcissism, a new study published in Psychological Science suggests that they might be attributable to the economy.
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Sense of purpose ‘adds years to life’
BBC: Having a sense of purpose may add years to your life, regardless of what the purpose is, research suggests. Not only does it contribute to healthy aging, but it may also stave off early death, according to a study of 7,000 Americans. The research, published in Psychological Science, applies across adult life, says a US-Canadian team. It may be because purposeful people look after their health better and are physically fitter, they believe. The study tracked the physical and mental health of more than 7,000 US adults aged 20 to 75 years. Read the whole story: BBC
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Local culture is in your genes
The Boston Globe: Previous research has shown that European-Americans have a more independent social orientation than people from East Asia. However, researchers at the University of Michigan have now qualified this relationship: Cultural differences are only observed among people with certain variants of a gene associated with dopamine function—and reward sensitivity—in the brain. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Cold, Hard Truth: Most People Can’t Handle Multitasking
Inc.: You’ve probably heard by now that multitasking simply doesn’t work. One study out of University of London showed that multitasking lowers your IQ by around 10 points, while Harvard Medical School declared war on the practice after activity-juggling doctors nearly caused fatal errors in treatment. The case against switching tasks seems pretty open and shut. But it seems there may be a few exceptions. A very few.
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Elite Colleges Don’t Buy Happiness for Graduates
The Wall Street Journal: A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think. ... University of Pennsylvania Professor Martin Seligman, who has studied the psychology of happiness, said it was impossible to know whether the college experiences Gallup asked about were the cause of later success or simply coincidental to it. "One hopeful possibility is that if college were changed to produce more emotional support, this would result in much more engagement later in life," he wrote in an email.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Orthographic Coding in Illiterates and Literates Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Karla Orihuela, and Manuel Carreiras Does literacy shape the way letter strings are visually processed? Literate and illiterate adults performed perceptual matching tasks in which they indicated whether a target string of symbols was the same or different from a previously presented reference string of symbols. "Different" character strings were created by changing the position of characters (transposed-characters condition) or by replacing one character in the string with a new character (replaced-characters condition).
