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The Military Epidemics That Aren’t
The Wall Street Journal: There is a growing presumption in the West that war dehumanizes those who experience combat, or, in more extreme expressions, even those who only serve in the military. In this country, for example, journalist Robert Koehler writes of war itself as a "disease," one that produces a nearly infinite variety of violent "symptoms." ... Compared with other countries, the United States diagnoses PTSD cases at improbably high rates. Recent PTSD rates in the U.S. have reached as high as 30%, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
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Good Deeds Gone Bad
The New York Times: ON your way to work today you may have paused to let another car merge into your lane. Or you stopped to give a dollar to a subway artist. A minute later, another chance to do the same may have appeared. Did your first act make the second more tempting? Or did you decide you had done your good deed for the day? Strangely, researchers have demonstrated both reactions — moral consistency and moral compensation — repeatedly in laboratories, leading them to ask why virtue sometimes begets more virtue and sometimes allows for vice. In doing so, they have shed an interesting light on how the conscience works.
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Writing – for health and happiness?
BBC: Decades of research have shown that writing down your emotions has concrete health benefits - even helping wounds heal. But as more and more people publish their intimate feelings online, could they be doing themselves more harm than good? High-profile coverage of cyberbullying might make sharing your deepest emotions online sound like a bad idea, but when it comes to the risks and benefits of writing online, advice is mixed. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, suggests questions about social media are included in visits to the doctor, a move prompted by worries about cyberbullying, internet addiction and sleep deprivation.
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Far From Being Harmless, the Effects of Bullying Last Long Into Adulthood
Serious illness, struggling to hold down a regular job, and poor social relationships are just some of the adverse outcomes in adulthood faced by those exposed to bullying in childhood.
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Giving Preschoolers Choice Increases Sharing Behavior
Getting kids to share their toys is a never-ending battle, and compelling them to do so never seems to help. New research suggests that allowing children to make a choice to sacrifice their own toys in order to share with someone else makes them share more in the future. The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. These experiments, conducted by psychological scientists Nadia Chernyak and Tamar Kushnir of Cornell University, suggest that sharing when given a difficult choice leads children to see themselves in a new, more beneficent light.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin The prevalent view of posttraumatic stress disorder suggests that people have trouble voluntarily recalling autobiographical memories of traumatic events but frequently recall these memories involuntarily. Participants were asked to think about an important event from the past week and rate the memory's valence and the intensity of the emotion they felt when remembering it. Participants also indicated how often they had voluntarily or involuntarily remembered the event.
